Satirical Post From 2018 Viral as Real Advert by Pakistan on FIFA World Cup Ball

Telstar was the official match ball for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, whereas Al-Rihla is this year's match ball.

A graphic which says, "Dear World, thank you for playing with our balls," is going viral on the internet.

What is the claim? : Social media users have shared the graphic saying that it is an advertisement by the government of Pakistan at the Qatar World Cup venue.

(Archives of similar claims can be found here, here, and here.)

The truth: We could trace back a similar version of the graphic to 2018.

• The official ball for the 2018 FIFA World Cup was Telstar, whereas Al-Rihla is the official match ball for this year's FIFA World Cup.

• As per reports, the majority of these soccer balls were manufactured in Sialkot, Pakistan.

How did we find out?: We performed a reverse image search on the viral image.

• A result on Tineye led us to a similar image uploaded on Reddit in 2018 with the caption, "Pakistan gets it".

• On comparing both the images, we found that the image of the soccer ball and the logo at the bottom-left appeared to be missing from the Reddit image.

• 'Proud to be Brand Pakistan' is a Facebook page that claims to be a patriotic forum.

Further, we found that a journalist also posted the same image on 19 June 2018 on Twitter.

• Her tweet also included screenshots. It showed a Twitter account called "Pakistan Defence Command," which had supposedly posted the image.

• The account's bio said, "No affiliation with any government organisation or agency. " The account has since been suspended.

Perils of 'patriotism'. 🤭 pic.twitter.com/7ovqTxD6W6

— Naila Inayat (@nailainayat) June 19, 2018

How did the picture get revived?: A user on Reddit posted the viral image on 20 November and categorised it as "humour". This post contained the picture of the 2018 official ball and had the logo at the bottom-left of the image.

Official ball of 2022 FIFA World Cup: According to the FIFA website, the match ball revealed by Adidas for this year's world cup is named Al-Rihla, which means "the journey" in Arabic.

Did Pakistan make any such advertisements? : On conducting a keyword search, we did not find any advertisements by the Pakistani government related to the ongoing World Cup.

Conclusion: Evidently, a humourous post was shared by social media users as a real advertisement made by the Pakistani government.

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