It is not a great time to be an Atlanta Falcons fan. Your team hasn’t won a playoff game in eight years. Your starting quarterback battle is between an injured Michael Penix Jr. and a faded Tua Tagovailoa. Signs of a stabilizing defense have been undermined by James Pearce’s arrest on three felony charges related to a domestic violence incident.
And now, a team from another continent playing an entirely different sport during your offseason has found a way to re-introduce the greatest shame in (American) football fandom.
Egypt’s national soccer team came into Tuesday’s Round of 16 match against reigning World Cup champion Argentina as an underdog. Still, the Pharaohs found themselves up 2-0 in the 79th minute — a score that would have been 3-0 if not for a controversial ruling that overturned a second-half Mostafa Zico goal that certainly looked legit.
Alas, a team wearing red and black in Atlanta wound up embracing its hosts a bit too hard. 15 minutes of game time later, the score was 3-2 in favor of Lionel Messi’s side. Egypt was going home. America, perpetually eager to introduce schadenfreude to an otherwise unremarkable weekday but especially interested in finding a distraction from its own humiliating Round of 16 loss hours earlier, perked up, pointed it its television screens, and screamed “28-3!”
You know it’s bad when Tom Brady chimes in to score points on you.
Yeah so that might top 28-3 🤯
— Tom Brady (@TomBrady) July 7, 2026
28-3 was, of course, the third quarter lead the Falcons blew in Super Bowl LI against Brady and the New England Patriots. It’s become a sigil for collapse, one suited for a franchise rooted in weirdness and frustration like Atlanta’s NFL team. Even if the Pharaohs weren’t dressed in red and black or playing in Georgia’s capital — which is not where 28-3 happened (that was Houston) — they would have drawn parallels to Dan Quinn’s inability to grind clock and keep Brady off the field.
As such, social media banded together, as it always does, to make the same joke 500,000 different ways.
Sorry, Falcons fans. Even in the offseason you can’t avoid reliving your worst day.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Egypt embraced the Falcons’ spirit by choking away a World Cup game in Atlanta
