One week into the FIFA World Cup, the Argentinian streaming channel Luzu TV was live on the air when host Florencia Peña falsely declared that Lionel Messi’s father, Jorge Messi, had died. Minutes later, Peña said nervously that producers had told her the information via her earpiece, but that she hadn’t seen it herself, that it was unconfirmed, and that she hoped it was fake.
Within minutes, Jorge, who is an icon in Argentina, became a trending topic on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sparking international confusion and outrage over the lack of verification.
But Jorge Messi was still alive. Messi’s family issued a statement saying that “in light of the accounts, rumors, and speculation circulating in recent hours, the family wishes to express its deep distress regarding the lack of sensitivity, respect, and scruples with which some individuals have treated a strictly private family matter…any account, statement, or information not originating from the family itself and its designated channels should not be considered valid or truthful.”
According to Spanish newspaper El Mundo, several advertisers pulled out of their deals with Luzu TV, and the channel fired Peña and the producers involved.
Distinguishing fact from fiction was especially difficult during this World Cup. The Luzu TV debacle was only the tip of the fake iceberg.
When Norway’s national team began training in North Carolina, a false narrative spread online that the team imported food from Norway because they didn’t trust American food. The Associated Press and other outlets debunked those claims (people just want their home comfort foods during times of stress!), but that didn’t stop the spread. According to social media monitoring platform Cyabra, 27% of the Twitter profiles contributing to that narrative were fake or bot accounts. Offline, I brought up the false claim to friends after seeing them on Instagram. It didn’t initially occur to me that they could be made up.
My For You tab on Twitter has also served me multiple fake quotes by Real Madrid coach José Mourinho — one of football’s most successful managers and biggest personalities — commenting on some of the tournament’s matches and controversies, like tactical choices of other coaches, refereeing decisions, and more. Mourinho is outspoken and funny, so the quotes seem believable at first glance. In reality, they’re posted by a handful of accounts that label themselves as parodies. But replies, quote tweets, and questions to Grok showed that people often believed them to be fact.
José Mourinho on Cristiano Ronaldo’s World Cup elimination:
“What Cristiano has done for Portugal is more than enough. People are obsessed with the World Cup as if it decides everything. Football is much bigger than one trophy.
If winning the World Cup is what makes you the… pic.twitter.com/pgrK1lGDp6
— Darren (@MUFCDarren_) July 7, 2026
Jose Mourinho: "The reason Argentina performed so poorly in the World Cup final is that they simply didn't deserve to reach the final. They should have been eliminated against Egypt, but they won purely because of the referee's decisions". pic.twitter.com/9uP55qybtu
— Goals Zone (@TheGoalsZoneHQ) July 20, 2026
On the Friday before Spain won the World Cup, my feed showed me a video of Spain’s Lamine Yamal and his three-year-old brother Keyne. Keyne went viral during the World Cup for his silliness, antics, and bond with his older brother. The video shows Yamal in a mirror, filming Keyne in a barber’s chair.
The tweet accompanying the video read: “Lamine Yamal took his younger brother, Keyne, to get a new haircut ahead of the FIFA World Cup final. 
”
In the video, Keyne’s hair is dyed light blue — Argentina’s team color.
I looked up the Instagram handles tagged on the video. One was from the barber, and when I checked his profile, I found the blue hair video. It was real, but it had been posted on May 16.
The tweet had taken the video out of context, but has already been viewed 8.4 million times and has been liked over 46,000 times. A community note is now displayed under the video saying as much, but it wasn’t there when I first saw it.
Lamine Yamal took his younger brother, Kayne, to get a new haircut ahead of the FIFA World Cup final. pic.twitter.com/0hOxlcVm64
— Cleverly 
(@Cleverlydey4u) July 17, 2026
Then there’s artificial intelligence. The AI-generated Lionel Messi-bathing-Lamine Yamal memes are all fun and games, until they aren’t. When Germany played Curaçao during the group stage of the tournament, one Twitter user posted what looked like a screenshot of the match broadcast showing a person dressed up as Hitler in a Germany jersey in the stands among other German fans. The image was created with ChatGPT. But the tweet is still live, without a community note, and has been viewed more than five million times.
This edition of the tournament has been called “the World Cup of Ugh“, of “price shock“, and “more.” But for me, it’s been the World Cup of distrust: Seeing something suspicious, looking into it, finding out it was false, and being horrified by the sky-high engagement numbers.
The examples above are just ones that I’ve actually seen on my own feeds; There’s no telling how many other false claims are floating around unchecked.
The World Cup of misinformation is a thief; it’s stolen my time and excitement during my favorite sporting event. Misinformation doesn’t just sow distrust between the public and the media. It robs us of the ability to trust what we see with our own eyes. The controversial uses of the video-assisted referee (VAR) to “eliminate human error” during the tournament told us as much; a flawed technology is to be trusted more than the human referees’ instincts, ignoring the fact that technology, too, can be biased.
Football Twitter — the massive online community of soccer fans, spectators, and journalists — has long been my favorite place on the internet. For nearly two decades, I’ve scrolled, liked, retweeted, searched for commentary, writing, and clips of match moments, and followed journalists for their analysis.
Despite higher levels of bots and slop and lower levels of moderation, sports fans and journalists are still using Twitter. No real replacement for it has emerged.
Leaving Twitter also doesn’t solve the problem. Misinformation and slop are everywhere, all the time. A false claim might originate on Twitter, but then it’s screenshotted and posted to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, a WhatsApp chat, a Slack thread, a group text, and elsewhere. And community notes don’t carry over.
Journalists are doing their best to pre-bunk and debunk misinformation and provide news consumers with accurate information. News outlets are improving their verification systems and tools and producing their journalism in mediums that people like to consume. But misinformation still spreads faster than the truth.
Football is called “the beautiful game” for its simplicity and accessibility. The team that works together to score more goals wins. Every player is responsible for helping achieve that positive outcome. Unless that mentality takes hold against misinformation, during the next World Cup we all may be watching the same match, but we will likely never again watch the same reality.
