FIFA: Online abuse hits over half of World Cup participants, study shows

Racism accounted for 20% of the abusive messages. Messages threatening violence and xenophobia were recorded at 14% and 12%, respectively. | Photo Credit: Reuters

FIFA’s Social ​Media Protection Service (SMPS) has found that more than half of the 1,606 ​players, coaches and officials ⁠at the 2026 FIFA World Cup received abuse online.

Over half of the individuals received at least one message which could be classified as abusive, while racism accounted for one in five of the abusive messages. Messages threatening violence and xenophobia were recorded at 14 percent and 12 percent respectively.

SMPS says that the individual who was the most targeted received around 10,000 abusive posts, of which 40 percent were racist.

SMPS analysed 17.1 million posts and comments and, after human review, discovered that about 2,40,000 were abusive. Their AI moderation tool filtered through 60.7 million comments on official FIFA and member association channels and hid 9.2 million of them, including spam. After this, FIFA escalated 2,905 accounts for investigation and even sent 786 of them to law enforcement for review

“Ahead of World Mental Health Day, we are reinforcing FIFA’s commitment to protecting the football community from online hate through optimised technology that tackles not only manually created content, but also AI-generated imagery. We remain resolute. FIFA’s SMPS is at the disposal of football stakeholders with a view to supporting all 211 FIFA Member Associations and the confederations alike, because we need to unite to tackle this abhorrent behaviour that causes distress and affects emotional well-being,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in a statement.