Claims that Queen Elizabeth II has ordered 80 Manchester United shirts and asked Cristiano Ronaldo, who has just signed for the team, for his signature have been shared thousands of times on Facebook.
The same claims have also appeared on other platforms such as Twitter, where they have also been shared by a huge number of accounts.
They have subsequently been picked up by several news sites around the world.
While we can’t say for sure where the claim originated, a number of accounts cited a verified Twitter account for the company Sport Innovation Society as the source of the claim.
But the account later deleted their tweet, and posted a reply which reads: “We could not confirm the veracity of the note from the Queen and CR7 [Cristiano Ronaldo, followed by his usual squad number] so we decided to delete the tweet. Apologies.”
There’s no evidence that these claims are true, and no credible sources have been provided to back them up.
As other fact checkers have written, there is no record of the 95-year-old monarch having ever expressed public support for Manchester United—or any specific football team, for that matter.
It has been rumoured in the past that the Queen supports West Ham or Arsenal, but this has never been officially confirmed.
Buckingham Palace declined to comment. Full Fact has contacted Sport Innovation Society for more information about the source of their claim.