Original article (in Serbian) was published on 07/04/2023
A 30-second video showing the confused football players of the Albanian national team in close-up while the anthem “God of Justice” is heard in the background has gone viral on TikTok these days. The account that posted it, however, manipulated the original video by “pasting” the melody of the Serbian national anthem on it. The mentioned video was created almost four years ago, and the wrong anthem for the Albanian national team was sung, but it was not the anthem of Serbia but of Andorra.
Football players in red jerseys stand before the start of the match, while the anthem “God of Justice” is heard in the background – this is shown in a video that is widely shared on TikTok these days. At the bottom of the video, it features the following – “Wrong anthem at the Albania match or is it not wrong after all?”. A close-up of the footballers’ faces shows that some of them are confused.
The video was posted on TikTok by the “Srpski insajder”, which mainly shares content related to football and is followed by over 21,000 people. The half-minute-long video was shared last week and has so far collected over 31,000 likes on this social network, and almost 670,000 people have seen it.
However, it is a video that has been manipulated because the melody of the anthem “God of Justice” has been pasted onto the original recording, which is not heard on the recording.
As can be determined in just a few minutes, the video was created on September 7, 2019, before the start of the match between the players of Albania and France in Paris. Then, instead of the Albanian anthem, the Andorran anthem was mistakenly played, not “God of Justice”. The original video can be found on the Internet, among other things, on sports websites such as Sportklub, which covered this event in detail at the time.
The start of the match was delayed for a few minutes because the Albanian national team refused to play until the mistake was corrected, so the Albanian national anthem was sung.
Another mistake happened at that match – the announcer at the stadium apologized to the “fans of Armenia” because of the wrong anthem, with whom this whole case has nothing to do.
France won the match 4:1, and the coach of the French national team, Didier Deschamps, apologized to the Albanians for the incident before the start of the match, saying that such a mistake “should not happen”.
“I understand the Albanians and it is logical that we waited so that they could also hear the national anthem before the match”, said Deschamps, reports the BBC in Serbian.
The Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, announced on Twitter that the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, sent him a “sincere apology for the scandalous gaffe of the French Football Association”. Macron called the mistake that happened “unacceptable”.
Three days later, France played a match against the Andorra national team, also within the qualification for the 2020 European Championship.
The following month, UEFA fined the French Football Association 20,000 euros for a mistake with the national anthem.