Old video of football fans lighting flares in a stadium is falsely linked to ongoing FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
November 30, 2022
A post is being shared on social media in which people in a football stadium can be seen burning firecrackers while police troops assemble on the football pitch. The post claims these as the visuals of a fire breakout at a stadium during the ongoing FIFA world cup match in Qatar. Let’s fact-check this claim through his article.
Claim: Video of a fire accident at a 2022 FIFA World Cup stadium in Qatar.
False: According to news reports, the visuals in the video belong to an incident that occurred in 2018 during a football match between Hamburg SV vs. Borussia Moenchengladbach in Hamburg, Germany. Reportedly a fire broke out in Qatar, 3.5 KM away from Lusail city’s World Cup stadium. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
We ran a reverse image search on the internet with a few screenshots from the video, leading us to news reports from 2018 (here, here and here).
These news reports contain images that match the visuals in the viral video. Reportedly, few fans of the Hamburger SV football set-off flares as an angry reaction to their team’s relegation from the Bundesliga football league. You can see the pictures of this incident uploaded to the stock image website Alamy here.
This incident occurred on 12 May 2018,  during the Hamburger SV vs Borussia Moenchengladbach match in the Volkspark stadium, Germany.  A video story on this incident by DW Kick-off can be seen here. You can also watch this video uploaded by 4S-TV which covers fans throwing flares toward the pitch while cops line up.
To know if any fire accident has occurred in a stadium during the ongoing FIFA world cup 2022, we searched the internet with relevant keywords and were led to a few relevant articles. Reportedly, a fire broke out in Qatar, 3.5 KM away from Lusail city’s World Cup stadium, which is contrary to what the post says. To learn more about the incident, click here and here.
To sum up, an old video of football fans burning flares in a stadium is shared as visuals of a fire accident during the ongoing FIFA world cup 2022.