Hyderabad: A post has gone viral on social media with the claim that Queen Elizabeth II once ordered 80 autographed jerseys of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo for the Royal Court.
Posts claiming that the Queen requested Manchester United Football Club to "reserve the first shirt to be signed by Cristiano Ronaldo" is also doing the rounds.
These rumors started circulating after Manchester United revealed new photographs of Ronaldo in the team's Jersey.
Fact Check
NewsMeter scanned the official page of Sports Innovation Society (SIS) that had tweeted the claim but could not find the tweet. SIS reportedly deleted the post a few hours after posting it as it could not verify the information.
Instead, we found an apology letter tweeted by Sports Innovation Society that said, "We could not confirm the veracity of the note from the Queen and CR7 so we decided to delete the tweet. Apologies."
From this, we conclude that SIS uploaded fake news by mistake and then apologised for the same.
This rumor reportedly did not stop circulating despite the apology by SIS. Media outlets picked up the story and started sharing it as a true story, citing SIS's original tweet. No other credible source has confirmed the news. By the time SIS deleted the post, it already had more than 10,000 likes within hours of posting and by the time they deleted it, it was too late. People believed the rumors and shared them on social media.
It is evident that the authorities made a mistake by tweeting fake information without verifying the claim which gave birth to this baseless rumor about the Queen. Hence, the claim is false.