Seven in 10 Premier League players are sent abusive tweets, study shows

More than 300 abusive tweets are sent to Premier League footballers every day and nearly seven in 10 players receive abuse on Twitter, according to a study.

Manchester United stars dominate the list of the 10 most abused players on the platform, led by Cristiano Ronaldo, Harry Maguire and Marcus Rashford, although the squad that receives the highest proportion of abusive tweets overall is Tottenham Hotspur.

The findings were released on Tuesday by the communications regulator Ofcom, ahead of the start of the new Premier League season this week.

“Over the years, football has made great strides in tackling unacceptable behaviour by small minorities which can blight the game for everyone else – from hooliganism, to contemptible racist or homophobic abuse. But those threats never go away; and sadly, as this report reminds, abuse now exists far from the stadium on social media,” said Kevin Bakhurst, the group director for broadcasting and online content at Ofcom.

He added: “Many victims – though by no means all – are from minority-ethnic backgrounds.”

Ofcom commissioned researchers at the Alan Turing Institute, the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, who analysed tweets sent during the first five months of the 2021-22 football season.

The institute looked at 2.3m tweets sent between 13 August 2021 and 24 January 2022 and the study also manually reviewed a randomly chosen sample of 3,000 tweets, which helped inform the machine-learning tool that powered the study.

It studied 618 player accounts via publicly available Twitter data, looking at tweets that tagged the player directly.

The report defined an abusive tweet as a message that “threatens, insults, derogates, dehumanises, mocks or belittles