Did Major League Soccer or FIFA publicly announce that LGBTQ+ flags will be prohibited at the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup? No, that's not true: The rumor originated from websites with satire labels. As of November 20, 2024, Lead Stories found no confirmation that either of the two sports organizations had issued such a statement.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on November 15, 2024. It said:
Pride Flags Permanently Banned By MLS For FIFA Club World Cup 2025, 'No More Woke Prides' -- SATIRE.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Nov 19 16:49:37 2024 UTC)
Satire labels
According to the edit history of this post, the word "satire" wasn't on it at first and was only added the day after its publication:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Nov 19 16:51:53 2024 UTC)
The first comment under the post added by the same account led to an article (archived here) making the same claim. The article ended with a disclaimer:
NOTE: This is SATIRE, It's Not True.
That article was produced by Esspots.com, a resource known for publishing made-up stories. The website's self-description (archived here) reads:
Our team of writers and editors is dedicated to bringing you the latest and greatest in fake news and absurdity, all with a healthy dose of humor and satire.
The account (archived here) that published the post on Facebook listed Esspots as a website it was affiliated with. The account's description showed one more satire label saying that "nothing on this page is real":
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Nov 19 19:03:42 2024 UTC)
MLS
Major League Soccer (archived here) is a professional soccer league in the U.S. and Canada. In 2019, it implemented (archived here) a new, "no political display" policy. As a result, MLS banned Iron Front flags but then lifted the restriction on this specific symbol (archived here). Later, in 2023, in light of the Hamas-Israel war, the organization prohibited (archived here) "flags representing a country or nationality" referencing the conflict in the Middle East.
The Esspots article cited a press release supposedly issued by MLS Commissioner Don Garber.
Garber is a real MLS commissioner (archived here), but Google searches for the specific quotes attributed to him seen here (archived here) and here (archived here) led only to duplicates of the claim. The searches didn't show any corroborating reports by credible media organizations.
A broad Google search across the MLS website for the keywords seen here (archived here) produced a series of pages describing the opposite: how the organization celebrates the LGBTQ+ community.
As of this writing, the MLS fan code of conduct (archived here) says nothing about an explicit ban on LGBTQ+ flags.
A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) didn't show any relevant credible reports about the organization introducing any bans on LGBTQ+ flags.
2025 FIFA Club World Cup
FIFA is an acronym commonly used to refer to the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, a global soccer governing body (archived here) headquartered in Switzerland.
Unlike the FIFA World Cup for national soccer teams, the FIFA Club World Cup is a competition between different clubs. In 2025, the latter will take place across 12 stadiums in the U.S (archived here).
It's FIFA, not MLS, that creates rules for those competitions.
A broad search across the FIFA website for regulations guiding the 2025 Club World Cup didn't produce any relevant results (archived here) specifying what symbols will be banned during the said championship.
The most recent, 2024 FIFA legal handbook (archived here) prohibits "political, religious or personal messages or slogans of any nature in any language or form by players and officials" and says that "all associations and clubs are liable for inappropriate behaviour on the part of one or more of their supporters" when those supporters resort to "the use of gestures, words, objects or any other means to transmit a message that is not appropriate for a sports event, particularly messages that are of a political, ideological, religious or offensive nature."
The same handbook asserts that "FIFA is committed to respecting all internationally recognized human rights and shall strive to promote the protection of these rights." That section explicitly includes nondiscrimination on sexual orientation, among many things.
In 2022, FIFA was criticized (archived here) for forcing players of national teams to abandon the idea of wearing symbols aimed to draw international attention to the state of LGBTQ+ rights in Qatar, which hosted that year's World Cup. That affected (archived here) some fans, too.
However, as of this writing, a broad search across the FIFA website for the keywords seen here (archived here) didn't produce any reports confirming the purported public announcement about the prohibition of pride flags.
A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) didn't show any relevant news articles covering the purported ban.
Lead Stories contacted the European football anti-discriminatory body Fare (archived here). Its Executive Director Piara Powar said on WhatsApp on November 19, 2025:
We have no indication that the Rainbow flag will be banned. Indeed FIFA have an active policy of not banning.
Lead Stories contacted both MLS and FIFA for additional comments. If we receive a response, this article will be updated as appropriate.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims concerning sports can be found here.
