Police receive almost 600 referrals of online abuse targeting England players

The UK Football Policing Unit has received nearly 600 referrals of online abuse towards England players since the start of Euro 2024.

The figures, revealed by Channel 4 News, showed spikes in abusive posts after England’s three group games, with the majority of posts containing racist content or language.

The UKFPU has confirmed that 26 cases are now under investigation.

“It’s roughly around 85 per cent of most of the grossly offensive posts that we see are racism, followed by homophobia,” said superintendent Mike Ankers, UKFPU investigations lead.

“We still get vile use of the N-word. They will be quite prominent.

“We’ll also get things like monkey emoji, that in itself will be grossly offensive. So we would be taking action.

“What we did see in 2022, which followed on from the 2021 missed penalties of the three black players (at the European Championships final) was a legislation change, which meant that online hate abuse became a section one offence which enables us to apply for a banning order.

“A banning order enables us to remove probably the one thing that they enjoy, which is football, for up to 10 years, which means that they can’t travel, they can’t go and watch games.”

England internationals Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho were the target of racist abuse online after missing spot-kicks in the penalty shoot-out against Italy three years ago – 11 people were subsequently arrested.

The UKFPU received 102 referrals of online abuse following England’s Euro 2024 opener against Serbia, with 12 of those cases now being investigated.

After the second game against Denmark, 292 social media posts were referred with three meeting the threshold for police investigation.

The final group game against Slovenia saw 177 posts referred with 11 cases being currently investigated.

The UKFPU said on Friday that six England fans were issued with football banning orders related to disorder in Gelsenkirchen ahead of the Serbia game on June 16.

Tony Burnett, chief executive of anti-racism football campaign group Kick It Out, told Channel 4 News: “This season we’ve seen a higher number of discrimination complaints than than ever, a record number.

“The increase in particular is coming from social media. I’m not saying the police aren’t doing anything. I’m not saying the social media organisations are doing nothing.

“But the experience of players, and our experience working in this field, is that the incidents are still going up. And while that’s the case, we can’t be complacent and say that enough is happening to stop it because it clearly isn’t.”

Social media giant Meta said in a statement: “Since 2016, we’ve invested more than 20 billion dollars into safety and security and quadrupled the size of our global team working in this area to around 40,000 people.

“This includes 15,000 content reviewers who review content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads.”

The new Online Safety Bill will mean that regulator Ofcom can hold social media platforms to account for online abuse.

Burnett added: “I’m really hoping that we win the tournament, in which case we might be having a very different conversation.

“If the unfortunate event occurs that we fail, whichever player is involved, I just really hope the social media organisations have learned from that experience (of Euro 2021), have put the preventative measures in place.

“The UKFPU is ready to prosecute anyone that does perpetrate that kind of abuse again.”