On July 13, 2025, English soccer team Chelsea Football Club won the FIFA Club World Cup at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Ahead of the jubilant team celebrations, FIFA President Gianni Infantino and U.S. President Donald Trump handed over the cup to club captain Reece James. However, instead of stepping aside for the customary trophy lift, Trump stayed onstage during the team's victory photos. Numerous pictures and video footage showed him standing among the team as they reveled in their victory.
After the match, social media users claimed that Chelsea deliberately edited Trump out of their official trophy lift photo. Examples of the rumor appeared on X (archived), Facebook and Instagram (archived), where people posted two identical pictures, one featuring the U.S. president and the other not.
One X user wrote: "Trump refused to leave even after they were practically pushing him away so Chelsea photoshopped him out of their official trophy raising photo. Good move."
(Facebook user "Occupy Democrats")
While Chelsea's official social media accounts did indeed share photos without Trump in the foreground, they did not deliberately edit him out of the images. Instead, they chose to publish photographs of the team celebrating after Trump moved to the back of the stage. As such, we have rated this claim as false.
Chelsea's official Instagram page shared the following post on July 14, 2025:
(Instagram user "chelseafc")
As seen in the image below, Trump can be spotted smiling behind one of the players.
(Instagram user "Chelseafc")
Likewise, the club posted both a video and an image featuring the U.S. president on their official X account.
Chelsea also opted to use photos without Trump in this blog post announcing their victory on their official website. However, the U.S. president could be seen in one of the pictures.
Footage of the victory ceremony shows Trump standing with the players for the initial photographs before he was ushered to the back at the 28-second mark.
According to Getty Images photographs of the event, Trump was indeed visible in the foreground at first before he moved to the back.
(Selcuk Acar/Anadolu/Getty Images)
(Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu/Getty Images)
It is clear that the image circulating online that had Trump edited out was not created by Chelsea. However, it was not possible to identify the source of the edited image.
We found a photograph from a similar angle to the edited picture that shows Trump clapping in the foreground.
(Sven Hoppe/Getty Images)
Chelsea player Cole Palmer later said in a news conference: "I knew [Trump] was going to be here but I didn't know he was going to be on the stand when we lifted the trophy so I was a bit confused."
Snopes has frequently covered misrepresentations of Trump on social media, including an AI-generated photograph of him dancing with a teen girl and miscaptioned footage of him allegedly giving a Nazi salute.