More Than 3,000 Abusive Posts Received by England Team

Recently, the English soccer team was targeted with over 3,000 abusive posts on social media during their victory over Spain. These sports tend to cause controversy online due to non-traditional values. For example, women may compete in a traditionally male-dominated game. Online users can go to extremes when expressing their discontent or support for teams when this happens.

Jess Carter, one of the players, received a lot of criticism, during the previous match against Sweden. Over 91% of posts about Carter expressed negative sentiment – an all-time high. Dr. Brian Beal, CEO of Sentient Sports, says that “the women’s game has the sexism angle, which is definitely driving a lot of it.” [3] Of the 14% of insulting or abusive posts about Carter, 85% was deemed hostile criticism, 12% was personal abuse, and 3% were discriminatory attacks.

Moonshoot, a UK-based threat monitoring service, analyzed threats of violence and abuse targeting England’s best players and head coach. [1] It found that out of 73,400 posts examined, over 3,000 contained hostile or concerning content. It reported that 95% of the posts targeted a head coach or a specific player. Moreover, over 99% of the posts remained online and were not deleted by moderators.

The abusive posts by sports fans are not moral and negatively affect athletes’ lives. Research has shown that this online abuse towards the athletes can have devastating effects on them, potentially leading to mental health issues, lower performance, and even withdrawal from sport. [4] FIA University Research Team conducted a survey and found that 90% of respondents ‘strongly’ agreed that online abuse had the potential to result in athletes withdrawing from participating altogether if not addressed. [5]

The problem is mostly caused by low moderation standards. Current moderation standards have drastically declined, with the takedown rates dropping from 28% to 6% in less than a year. [2] Future efforts will most likely focus on raising the moderation standards up again and banning more offensive users. Guidelines need to be set up and tools that can detect harmful content need to be established.

This large problem of people not accepting others’ harmless non-traditional values and attacking them is not acceptable. Moderation by detecting harmful contents and establishing guidelines is one of the key solutions to this type of problem. Six billion posts were removed through moderation in the second half of 2020. [6] The standards need to be brought up further, as the low standards means pretty much every post flies and stays in the air.

Sources:

1. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6527679/2025/07/31/england-euro-2025-social-media-abuse/

2. https://bvmsports.com/2025/07/31/england-team-faces-3000-abusive-posts-during-euro-2025-final/

3. https://www.skysports.com/football/news/28508/13399844/jess-carter-online-hate-monitoring-shows-scale-of-abuse-directed-at-england-defender

4. https://sports-chair.essec.edu/resources/student-insights/online-abuse-and-athlete-mental-health

5. https://www.fia.com/news/fia-uaoa-survey-unveils-alarming-insights-90-federations-agree-sporting-figures-are-risk

6. https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Content-Moderation-By-The-Numbers-v5.pdf