Online abuse in football ahead of the World Cup: what has changed?

Insight

07.07.2026

As the FIFA World Cup is now underway, attention on players and clubs has intensified. Major tournaments have long been tied to spikes in online engagement, but also a corresponding rise in online abuse targeting players and key individuals involved.

The last World Cup cycle highlighted concerns about the scale and nature of abuse on social media platforms. A 2025 BBC investigation (discussed in our article 'Responding to online abuse in football') highlighted online abuse (including racist, misogynistic and threatening content) directed at managers and players in the Premier League and Women's Super League.

Since then, the legal and regulatory landscape has evolved, most notably with the introduction of the UK’s Online Safety Act. The question now, as the tournament progresses, is whether those changes are likely to make a meaningful difference in reality.

The Online Safety Act: a changed framework

In our previous article on the Online Safety Act, we considered the framework it introduced to address harmful online content. Now that framework is being transitioned from legislative intent to implementation.

This Act places duties on platforms not only to respond to illegal content, but to assess and mitigate the risks of harm arising on their services. This represents a significant shift away from a reactive model that focuses on individual posts towards a proactive and more holistic approach to online safety.

The plan is that this will result in better moderation systems and earlier identification of abuse, as well as placing greater accountability on social media platforms. However, the extent to which these obligations will translate into a better and safer digital landscape, including when it comes to online abuse directed at key figures in sport, is uncertain.

The remaining challenges of tackling online abuse

While there is hopefully a greater recognition of the need to address online abuse in sport, many challenges remain.

Firstly, we have seen in our practice an increase in online campaigns involving harassment and misinformation, often spread across different platforms and making use of AI, rendering such campaigns potentially harder to detect and control.

Secondly, the issue of identifying posters remains. Anonymous or 'bot' accounts continue to make effective enforcement difficult. While legal tools exist to obtain information about users in appropriate cases, these processes can be time-consuming and sometimes jurisdictionally complex – particularly where platforms or data are located outside the UK.

Thirdly, abuse and harm can spread rapidly online. Even increased platform accountability may not be sufficient to stop the spread of abuse or misinformation as, by the time a platform has removed harmful content, it may have spread widely (particularly if AI is involved). By that stage, the reputational and potentially emotional impact on the targeted individual may be significant, not to mention the wider harms of abusive and unacceptable content being spread and viewed by large audiences online.

Preparing for online abuse during the World Cup

Against this backdrop, governing bodies and senior figures in the football world would do well to take a proactive approach during the World Cup.

Steps could include:

establishing monitoring processes and developing internal action plans for responding to abusive content;
identifying possible response strategies;
preserving evidence of online abuse; and
coordinating both legal and communications responses.

Online abuse should also be considered in a safeguarding context. Sports organisations should recognise the significant impact online abuse can have on players, staff and other individuals, and ensure that appropriate support mechanisms are available. They should have clear policies in place that define unacceptable online behaviour, explain how concerns regarding online abuse can be reported, and set online conduct expectations for players and staff alike.

Sports organisations should also be mindful of their duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. This duty will be enhanced in October 2026 by placing an obligation on employers to instead take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. As a result, sports organisations should ensure that their policies, risk assessments and reporting mechanisms also address sexual harassment occurring online.

More generally, organisations should provide training to ensure that staff understand how to respond appropriately to reports of online abuse (including sexual harassment) to support those affected and identify when concerns are sufficiently serious to warrant referral to external agencies.

In addition to considering the Online Safety Act, relevant bodies and clubs can make use of other, more established areas of law, such as defamation (see our article on the Eniola Aluko and Joey Barton defamation case, in which Eniola Aluko successfully sued Barton for defamatory remarks he published about her on X), harassment, data protection (where inaccurate and/or sensitive content is published about identifiable individuals) and, for the worst offenders, criminal law (including private prosecutions where the police are unwilling or reluctant to act, potentially due to a lack of resources).

The introduction of the Online Safety Act reflects a clear shift that platforms should bear greater responsibility for the environments they create. The coming months will test how far that shift is realised in practice.

In the meantime, the most effective protection against online abuse is likely to remain a combination of preparation, swift response and a willingness, where appropriate, to pursue those responsible.

This publication is a general summary of the law. It should not replace legal advice tailored to your specific circumstances.