Joke posts about China’s dashed World Cup hopes mislead users

An old video of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen shows her laughing in parliament about the state’s purchase of circus animals, contrary to posts claiming it shows her mocking China’s failure to qualify for the 2026 World Cup. Despite Chinese subtitles saying otherwise, nowhere in Frederiksen’s speech from October 2019 does she mention China or football.

“The Danish prime minister laughed uncontrollably at the Chinese national football team,” reads simplified Chinese text superimposed on a Douyin video posted on July 15, 2025.

The video shows Chinese football fans chanting “So embarrassing!” before cutting to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen speaking in parliament.

According to Chinese subtitles on the video, she tells her colleagues that it should not be a problem for a large country with a population of over one billion to build a strong football team. While stifling laughter, she purportedly says the Chinese squad is “a joke to the world” and they “never fought for the honour of their country”.

As she appears to read out the results of China’s World Cup qualification matches, she and other lawmakers break out in laughter.

The clip of Frederiksen’s speech was also shared in similar posts on  Facebook and Instagram, as well as on Chinese social media platforms Red Note, Weibo and Bilibili.

“I felt sad after watching the video. You guys can laugh, but China will kick you to death in the future!” read a comment on one of the posts.

Another read: “I also laughed from the bottom of my heart. This is a joke to the whole world!”

The posts surfaced after China failed to qualify for the 2026 World Cup; the country has only been to one World Cup tournament, in 2002 (archived link).

According to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper, Chinese social media users branded the side a “waste of national resources” and head coach Branko Ivankovic also came in for some heavy criticism (archived link).

The video circulating online, however, does not show Denmark’s prime minister laughing at the Chinese national team.

Purchase of circus animals

A combination of reverse image searches using keyframes from the falsely shared video and keyword searches on Google led to the same footage published with Danish-language subtitles by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) on October 4, 2019 (archived link).

Its headline translates as, “Mette Frederiksen burst out laughing during the opening parliamentary debate”.

The subhead states that Frederiksen laughed as she talked about the state’s purchase of an elephant and a camel.

The government bought them after it banned circuses from keeping live animals (archived link).

AFP previously debunked similar posts that circulated in March 2024, which falsely claimed the Danish prime minister had mocked Taiwan.

A Danish-speaking correspondent at AFP said Frederiksen was discussing how the state ended up purchasing a camel alongside the four elephants it initially planned to buy.

“What we didn’t know when we started this transaction — and that is no laughing matter — is that Ramboline, that is one of the elephants,  also had a friend, a best friend: a camel. The camel is of course called Ali. And we were informed that it would be wrong to separate Ramboline and Ali,” Frederiksen said before she started laughing.

She went on to say the government bought Ali as well, only to find out later the camel was not really “best friends” with Ramboline the elephant.

“So we probably didn’t get the best deal. I was actually also slightly worried that, as the camel was named Ali, that Nye Borgerlige would pull out of the deal, but you didn’t, thank you for that,” she said, referring to the Danish right-wing political party, known as New Right.

Frederiksen’s laughing fit was also shown in videos published by Euronews and NBC News, both of which reported it was caused by her speech about the circus animals (archived here and here).

AFP also previously debunked another false claim targeting the Chinese football team here.