FIFA said on Friday that more than half of the players, coaches and officials covered by its social media abuse protection service during the 2026 World Cup were subjected to online abuse. The organisation’s data showed that 812 of the 1606 people received at least one abusive message during the monitoring period.
Racism tops monitored digital abuse
Racism was the leading form of discriminatory abuse, accounting for 12% of all violations detected by the service. Its share rose to 20% when general abuse was excluded. FIFA said the most targeted individual received more than 10,000 abusive posts, noting that around 40% of them were racist.
The monitoring efforts also included examining 60.7 million comments posted on the official channels of FIFA and its member national associations. The service blocked 9.2 million comments from the content it examined, including spam messages as well as abusive content.
