Claim: ICC tweeted that if India and Afghanistan do not participate in the Champions Trophy 2025, Sri Lanka and Netherlands will qualify instead.
Fact: The claim is false; no such tweet was posted by the ICC. The screenshot circulating on Threads is doctored.
On 16 July 2024, a user on Threads posted a screenshot of a tweet (archive) with the caption, “If India and Afghanistan do not participate in Champion Trophy 2025 then Sri Lanka and the Netherlands will qualify”.
ICC Champions Trophy 2025
The ICC Champions Trophy for the year 2025 is scheduled to begin in Pakistan on 19 February in Karachi, and the final of the eight-team tournament will be played on 9 March in Lahore.
Pakistan holds the hosting rights for the tournament and is adamant about staging the entire competition within its borders. However, as per media reports, chances are high that the Indian cricket team may not travel to Pakistan due to precarious diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Fact or Fiction?
To investigate the claim, Soch Fact Check conducted an advance search on X (formerly Twitter). However, no such tweet from ICC’s official account turned up. On closer inspection, we noticed grammatical errors and discrepancies in the format of the tweet, such as the word “Netherlands” being misspelled along with spacing issues.
Moreover, a keyword search on Google led to a recent article by Dawn from 4 July 2024. Dawn quoted an ICC source who said “All board chiefs of the ICC Champions Trophy participating countries [minus BCCI] have assured him of their complete support but BCCI will consult its government and update the ICC”.
Faizan Lakhani, a sports journalist from Karachi, also tweeted on 22 July 2024, confirming that, “there’s no change in tournament’s position & it will be held in Pakistan as planned.” According to his X post, there was no mention of ICC Champions Trophy 2025 in ICC statements following the annual conference & CEC meeting.
In addition to this, Soch Fact Check could not find any credible news outlets reporting on Afghanistan’s refusal to travel to Pakistan for the tournament.
Most importantly, the qualifying criteria for the Champions Trophy is a systematic process. Since 2009, the tournament has only involved the eight highest-ranked teams as per the ICC ODI Rankings from six months before the beginning of the tournament. However, starting from the 2025 ICC Champions Trophy onwards, the top eight teams of the most recent ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup will qualify for the event. Both Sri Lanka and Netherlands are not on the top eight teams and ICC has not announced any other qualifying criteria if one country refuses to play.
Virality
The fake screenshot on Threads received 141 likes and 53 comments at the time of publishing.
Conclusion: The ICC did not say that Sri Lanka and the Netherlands will qualify for the Champions Trophy 2025 if India and Afghanistan refuse to participate in the upcoming tournament in Pakistan. A screenshot of such a tweet by the ICC, circulating on Threads, is doctored.
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