QPR’s Stephane Mbia says Marseille tweets came from hacked account

London: Stephane Mbia has denied saying that he does not have a future at Queens Park Rangers following their relegation to the Championship and claims his Twitter account was hacked after a series of messages appeared expressing an apparent eagerness to return to Marseille.

The Cameroon international, who was signed for around £4m from the French club last August with QPR’s Joey Barton moving in the opposite direction on a season-long loan, has just under 32,000 followers on the social networking site and appeared to contact the one-time England midfielder on Monday asking if he would consider swapping clubs again at the end of the season.

The message, “Do you want to rechange [sic] your seat with me”, was later removed only to be replaced at around 4pm with a further Tweet, first in French and then repeated in English, that read: “No it was not a joke. I delete my tweet on pressure. I want speak with QPR but they don’t want. So @Joey7Barton do you want rechange your seat with me?”

Yet Mbia, when asked to explain that follow-up, claimed he had not written the messages.

“I do not know how this happened, but someone must have got hold of my login and password because I did not write these things,” he said.

“This was not me. I did not write the tweets, and I have made people at the club aware of that. I saw the messages this morning and spoke with the club about them, but now I see there are more appearing in my name.”

Barton, who was sent off on his last appearance for QPR against Manchester City in the final game of last season and was given a 12-game ban, had actually responded to the original message. “How do I answer this politically? Er... Nope,” he wrote, before adding: “If you go down with a team, you should stay and help them up mate. They need you all to stick together and help them back.”

The reality is that the future for Mbia at Loftus Road, like that of many of the players recruited by Mark Hughes expense last summer, will only become clear when he meets with the chairman, Tony Fernandes, and the current manager, Harry Redknapp at the end of this campaign.

While the QPR hierarchy have indicated they are willing to fight to retain the players who Redknapp feels can restore the club to the top flight at the first time of asking, there will be high-profile departures from the west London club.

Should interest be lodged in the 26-year-old midfielder, who has made 27 Premier League starts this term, then it is likely he will be permitted to leave the club who currently prop up the division.

“But I have two games left to play and I want to concentrate on those,” Mbia said. “Afterwards, I will speak with the chairman and the manager and see what they want to do. We will see.”

Barton himself has been handed a two-game suspended ban for calling the Paris Saint-Germain defender Thiago Silva an “overweight ladyboy” on Twitter.

The French league’s national ethics committee imposed the sanction after deeming the Englishman’s comments “inappropriate”.

PSG had threatened their own action against Barton, whose comments also drew condemnation from gay activists.