FA to fund police to tackle social media abusers at Euros

The Football Association is funding a police unit to ensure social media abusers throughout England's Euro 2024 campaign are prosecuted.

Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho were all targets of racial abuse after missing penalties in the shootout defeat to Italy in the final of Euro 2020.

Police chiefs have been pro-active ahead of the upcoming tournament, visiting the England squad at St George’s Park in March.

Mark Roberts, of England's National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for football policing, said last month that "it is better if you can deal with something in advance rather than after the event".

And the amount police can do has now been boosted by FA backing, as chief executive Mark Bullingham laid out the strategy ahead of England’s Euro 2024 opener against Serbia on Sunday.

"Now we are doing things differently," Bullingham said.

"In the past what we did was put together all the data, effectively an evidence pack, to give to the police to prosecute but this time we have gone a stage further where we are actually funding within the British Police a unit that will then prosecute.

"What we don’t want to do is create a pack that we then give to the police for them to prosecute but they don’t have the resource to actually take that forward so we are actually paying for the prosecution to then happen and funding the police to make sure if there are instances of some examples we have seen before, that they got prosecuted."

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Bullingham said the funding resource would cost the