2 min readJun 18, 2026 01:05 PM IST
Lionel Messi scored a hat-trick as Argentina beat Algeria 3-0 in Kansas City on Tuesday. By the time the final whistle blew, a video claiming to show Algerian fans chanting “Messi is the enemy of Allah” before the match had already spread across X, TikTok and Instagram, drawing millions of views and a wave of anti-Muslim commentary. The video had nothing to do with the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
A fact-check published by ‘Lead Stories’ on Wednesday found the footage was filmed outside the World Trade Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, where Algerian fans had gathered for a pre-match pep rally ahead of a friendly against the Netherlands on June 3 — nearly two weeks before the Kansas City game. The audio, meanwhile, was a separate TikTok sound entirely: a chant originally directed at Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, dubbed over the Rotterdam footage and recaptioned.
The posts began appearing on TikTok as early as June 13, three days before the Algeria-Argentina match, with captions placing the footage in the United States. By the time Messi kicked off, the clip was already primed and ready. When Argentina won, accounts with large followings posted versions of the video framed as a punchline: fans who called Messi the enemy of God, humbled by three goals.
The account that gave the story its biggest push was Visegrad 24, a right-wing Central European outlet with over two million followers on X. Its post carried the full fabricated narrative as fact and drew thousands of replies. The comments that followed were not about football. They rarely are, when the point was never football to begin with.
Lead Stories confirmed the Rotterdam location through Google Maps, matched the Stadion Feijenoord signage visible in a second version of the clip, and identified the audio as a pre-existing TikTok sound with no connection to the Algeria-Argentina fixture.
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