The Who have found themselves inadvertently embroiled in a row with fans of boyband One Direction on social media site, Twitter.

The row stems from comments made by Click Music, which saw certain similarities between the intro on One Direction’s new single, “Best Song Ever”, and The Who’s track, “Baba O’Riley“.

Fans of the boyband immediately took to Twitter, hitting out at unsubstantiated suggestions that The Who want to “delete” the song.

Comments from One Direction fans included “Who The Hell are The Who they have the Perfect Name cuz No One really Cares and Knows About Them!” and “The Who is just too jealous with our boys bcause our boys can sing a better song that The Who did.”

One Direction fans marked their protest with a Twitter hashtag, #donttouchbestsongever.

In a moment of solidarity between rival fans, Justin Bieber followers have also waded in to support the One Direction fans.

Meanwhile, One Direction’s producer Julian Bunetta admitted similarities between the two songs, but denied copyright violation, saying: “At a certain point we recognised it had the same type of intro where there’s a synth and a piano, but we really tried to make sure that there was no intellectual property stolen or anything like that.”

The Who have yet to comment.

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