I’m in the kitchen with cold coffee and my phone, scrolling through X with the TV on mute behind me. A photo pops up showing a soccer field covered in rainbow Pride flags, laid out across the grass in neat rows. It looks like the field at Lumen Field in Seattle, where Iran played Egypt in the World Cup’s “Pride Match” last Friday, and the caption says “Seattle trolled Egypt and Iran so hard.”

The photo looks right at first, but the flags sit too flat against the turf, and each one catches the light the same way — even, clean, like someone painted them onto the grass instead of laying them down. I check the TV broadcast clips, the AP photos, and the Getty Images gallery from the match, and none of them show this scene, even though every major network sent cameras to that game.

So I looked into it. Here’s what I found.

Rainbow Flags Cover the Field at the Iran-Egypt “Pride Match” — Except They Never Did

AI-GENERATED — An AI-made photo claiming to show Pride flags on the field before the Iran-Egypt World Cup match in Seattle. No flags appeared on the field during the real match.  URL_1

On June 27, 2026, the X account @zachleft posted a photo that appeared to show Pride rainbow flags spread across the soccer field at Lumen Field in Seattle, just before the Iran-Egypt World Cup match. The caption read, “Seattle trolled Egypt and Iran so hard.” The image spread fast, landing in the middle of one of the biggest fights of the entire tournament.

The fight was real. FIFA had scheduled Iran vs. Egypt in Seattle during the city’s Pride weekend, and both countries’ soccer federations asked FIFA to block any Pride-related events inside the stadium. FIFA said fans could bring rainbow flags but removed any official “Pride Match” branding from the event. Real fans did wave rainbow flags in the stands — AP photographers and the Times of Israel both confirmed this. But no one put Pride flags on the field.

Lead Stories ran the image through OpenAI’s verification tool on June 29, and the tool found a SynthID watermark embedded in the image, which confirmed that an AI tool had made it. Lead Stories also compared the fake to a real photo from Getty Images photographer Stu Forster and a Fox Sports broadcast replay of the match, and both showed only the flags of Iran and Egypt on the field — no rainbow flags anywhere.

The fake worked because the real story was so heated. Iran and Egypt had protested for months, FIFA had gone back and forth on what to allow, and Seattle’s own World Cup host committee had originally planned Pride-themed events around the match. So when the photo appeared, people on both sides of the argument had a reason to believe it and share it — either to celebrate or to complain.