What was claimed
The Metropolitan Police has confirmed Arsenal’s victory parade was “the biggest ever parade held in the country” and an estimated 1.5 million people were there.
Our verdict
The Met Police says it hasn’t given any official estimates for the number of people attending, or said that the parade was the biggest ever held. Crowd size estimates are often disputed, but Islington Council has said “over a million” attended.
Viral posts on social media have claimed the Metropolitan Police has said that 1.5 million people attended Arsenal’s title parade on Sunday.
This isn’t an official figure. The Metropolitan Police told Full Fact it has not given out any official estimates for the number of people who went to the parade.
Some posts we’ve seen also claim that the Metropolitan Police has confirmed that Arsenal’s parade was “the biggest ever parade held in the country”. However the Met told us this is also not something it has said.
As we’ve written before, crowd sizes at large events can be very difficult to estimate, and are often disputed. But on Monday Islington Council said “over a million” attended. We’ve asked for more details on how this estimate was calculated and will update this fact check if we hear back.
We’ve also asked Arsenal Football Club whether it has produced its own estimate for the size of the parade, which took place in north London to celebrate Arsenal’s men’s team winning its first Premier League title in 22 years, and the women’s team winning the FIFA Women’s Champions Cup.
Ahead of the parade, it was reported that between 500,000 and one million people could attend. Media reports in the immediate aftermath of the event varied, with some suggesting between 750,000 and a million people turned out, and others simply estimating that it was “hundreds of thousands”.
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Some of the posts we’ve seen also include an image supposedly showing an aerial view of streets around the Emirates Stadium, which has been generated using artificial intelligence.
The street layout in the image does not match the actual area around Arsenal’s stadium, and according to an OpenAI tool the image contains a SynthID watermark, an invisible digital watermark which indicates it was created either wholly or partially using OpenAI tools.
It’s common to see the size of crowds at large public events like this one disputed, with estimates varying. Earlier this year we looked at why experts say that accurately counting the size of a crowd at a non-ticketed event is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the image is not real and the Metropolitan Police has not given an official estimate for the size of the crowd.
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Subscribe to weekly email newsletters from Full Fact for updates on politics, immigration, health and more. Our fact checks are free to read but not to produce, so you will also get occasional emails about fundraising and other ways you can help. You can unsubscribe at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy.