The 2026 World Cup brought the issue of electronic abuse back to the forefront of discussion within football, not as a result of public campaigns against hatred, but rather through clear numbers announced by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), revealing the extent of the problem that has come to accompany major matches, especially after the moments of exclusion and penalty kicks.
During the group stage alone, FIFA’s social media protection service monitored more than 89,000 offensive posts, after analyzing more than 6 million posts and comments. The number does not seem normal when compared to the 2022 Qatar World Cup, as FIFA said that the volume of abuse increased 13-fold, after the number of offensive posts at the same stage was about 6,700 posts.
The most dangerous thing about the numbers is not the size alone, but the quality of the content. According to FIFA, insults of a racist nature constituted 11% of the total offensive content that was monitored, an increase of 3% compared to the same stage of the 2022 World Cup. The service also referred about 225,000 posts and comments to human review, and about a thousand accounts were escalated for further investigation, while more than 100 cases exceeded the legal threshold that allows the preparation of files to prosecute their owners.
These numbers mean that the problem is no longer just angry comments after a match. There is a clear transition from sports criticism to personal targeting, and from objecting to a player’s performance to attacking him on the basis of color, origin, or family background. This transformation often appears in matches that are decided by small details, especially penalty kicks. This was evident after the Netherlands lost to Morocco on penalties in the round of 32. Justin Kluivert, Quentin Temper, and Crescencio Summerville were subjected to racist abuse online after missing penalty kicks, while the Dutch Football Association condemned what happened and announced that it would deal with the abuse through channels specialized in combating digital discrimination.
The issue here does not relate to the Netherlands alone, nor to Morocco alone, nor to one match. What happened summarizes a broader problem in modern football, as players are now directly exposed to a global audience, separated from it only by a phone screen. In the past, anger often remained in the stands, in the press or in post-match discussions. Today, anger reaches the player’s account, his family, and his personal pages, at a pace that clubs or teams cannot easily control.
Part of the crisis is related to the nature of the penalty shootout itself. It summarizes an entire match in an individual moment, and turns a collective defeat into a mistake bearing the name of a specific player. But the other part is related to communication platforms, where the most severe and widespread posts are rewarded, and where the loss turns into a wave of comments, and sometimes into an organized campaign, before deletion or ban procedures begin.
FIFA says that the expansion of the tournament to 48 teams increased the volume of content being monitored, but the expansion alone does not explain the increase in the rate of racist abuse, nor does it justify the transformation of some sports discussions into hate speech.
Increasing the number of matches means increasing interaction, but it also reveals that the control tools are still catching up with the problem after it occurs, rather than preventing it in the first place.
