Mentions of The Sunday Herald have understandably soared since it decided to partially identify a Premiership footballer alleged to have taken out a media injunction over an affair with former Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas.

However, according to a Brandwatch search a sports blog called the Daily Sport Betting Blog revealed the identity of the player on April 14.

The player was named in several comments underneath the post  and the comments have never been removed from the story.

Dailysportsbettingblog.com is not connected to the The Daily Sport came, but it still came before Twitter users on mass started naming the football star on mass and five weeks ahead of the Sunday Herald’s decision to publish yesterday, which was both a brave move and a neat little PR stunt all rolled into one.

The Scottish newspaper’s decision to publish the picture has added to the number of voices predicting that super injunctions can not survive in their current form with calls for fresh legislation.

The prime minister, David Cameron, has said, that the publication of the player’s name on line makes the situation unsustainable and unfair on newspapers. He said Parliament needed to take a look at the issue.

“It is rather unsustainable, this situation, where newspapers can’t print something that clearly everybody else is talking about, but there’s a difficulty here because the law is the law and the judges must interpret what the law is.

“So I think the Government, Parliament has got to take some time out, have a proper look at this, have a think about what we can do, but I’m not sure there is going to be a simple answer.”

“It’s not fair on the newspapers if all the social media can report this and the newspapers can’t, so the law and the practice has got to catch up with how people consume media today,” Cameron said.

Over the weekend, over 30,000 people potentially broke the injunction again by tweeting about the story with many posting pictures of the front page of the Sunday Herald.

Brandwatch found that comparing mentions of Sunday Herald to the same time 24hours period last week they increased from 216 to 2,204 as the player and Imogen Thomas were mentioned across dozens of sites. The top ten sites are led by Twitter.com and Facebook.

Many are now calling for the star to come clean rather than seek to hide behind lawyers when his name is already universally known.

EdenCancan MD, Nick Fulford, told PR Week: “If he was a client of mine, then I would pose the questions in the age of the internet where keeping a secret is almost impossible, what’s better? To allow this sort of continual witch hunt or to take the negative publicity in one hit? It proves the days of super injunctions is over. The days of keeping quiet and it’ll all blow over don’t happen anymore because of the internet.”