Connection has always been one of the biggest selling points of football. The sound of the chants, the shared pain of a lost opportunity, and the feeling that, for ninety minutes, thousands of strangers want exactly the same thing as you.
Social media promised a deeper connection with your favourite team and players, however it turned into something which can become so toxic some players ignore social media and want nothing to do with it.
When The Final Whistle Doesn't End The Abuse
After the 2020 Euro's Final, Jadon Sancho, Marcus Rashford and a 19 year-old Bukayo Saka notoriously received heaps of racial abuse after missing their penalties in the final.
This was a dark moment for England not only in terms of the loss in the final but socially.
Racist comments and emojis appeared beneath their Instagram photos in a matter of minutes.
Later, Saka said that he knew what was going to happen as soon as his shot was saved. He described it as a sad fact that the platforms that were hosting the abuse weren't doing enough to stop it.
Three years later, following another final defeat at Euro 2024, researchers discovered at least 80 monkey gifs and further racist insults uploaded to his page; some of these were left online for more than 24 hours even after being reported.
In response to constant hate online, other players have just moved away. Reece James deleted his Instagram entirely after a barrage of racist messages in 2021.
Thierry Henry went one step further and stopped using all platforms until companies treated online harassment with the same seriousness as copyright violations.
Anyone who enjoys the beautiful game should be troubled by that repetition. The storm of hate that passed over in 2021 is not an isolated incident.
Apologies, statements, and entire England teams have all passed and the attempt to break this pattern has still not been successful.
Women's Football Faces A Different Kind Of Abuse
If there's one unsettling fact about modern football, it's that the amount of hate directed at the female players has increased along with the popularity of the women's game.
There have been many countless social media posts where female players receive over the top criticism for simply playing their sport.
According to FIFA's research of more than 5 million posts, approximately 1 in 5 players were targeted during the Women's World Cup, and female athletes were 29% more likely than male players to experience online abuse at the equivalent men's World Cup.
But the type of abuse, rather than the volume, is the more interesting discovery.
More than half of the harassment directed at female football players was sexist, homophobic, or sexual.
Mary Earps, The World Cup-winning England goalkeeper wrote in her autobiography that she struggled with depression, body image, and suicidal thoughts during lockdown.
After a previous manager interfered, she finally sought professional help. Her experience serves as a reminder that social media frequently serves as the loudest amplifier, and that player health in football is rarely about a single bad night online. Rather, it is about the cumulative weight of scrutiny.
How Social Media Changed Football Forever
The original creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, said that social platforms are built to "make the world more open and connected."
The original role of social media was for deeper connection between everyone. But people have now lived in a social media heavy society for a long time now, and it seems that it can also polarise and divide people just as strongly.
Intimate moments that players decide to share from their personal lives can polarise the comment section. Intimacy runs in both directions.
The same Instagram page that is open and unfiltered when a player misses a penalty can be the same one that allows them to share a pregnancy scan or a visit to a charity.
A journalist, an editor, or a print deadline used to act as a buffer between a poor performance on Saturday and a player hearing about it.
Athletes' voices are now amplified by social media, but it also exposes their reputations to a different type of criticism.
The same social media pages that help athletes develop their personal brands also make them more susceptible to negative attention.
FIFA's Growing Role In Tackling Abuse
Some progress has been made. Every football association participating in the 2026 World Cup will receive a copy of FIFA's AI moderation tool.
This tool can scan 30,000 keywords and hide offensive comments in two seconds on YouTube, TikTok, and Meta platforms, but notably not X.
It is now possible to even exclude fans who submit abusive messages from purchasing match tickets.
In just three months, Meta claims to have eliminated 2.6 million malicious posts from Facebook and Instagram, the majority of which were discovered before they were even reported.
This change has significance, but it also serves as a reminder that the issue is being handled rather than resolved.
What Every Young Footballer Should Learn About Social Media
Silence usually doesn't do much. The likes of Thierry Henry, Bukayo Saka, Vinicius Junior all spoke out. They all found that talking about the abuse aloud helped them more than hearing about it in silence.
The message for a young player is not that resilience means remaining silent; rather, it's the reverse of the traditional football attitude to "just get on with it."
Resilience is shown in practice by bringing up an issue with teammates, coaches, and family members who can genuinely support.
Resilience can be trained. Not just inherited.
The ability to bounce back and adjust in the face of difficulty is known as resilience, and academies are increasingly treating it as a skill that needs to be developed with the same intensity as technique or fitness, rather than something a player either possesses or lacks.
