The X factor: how tweeting polluted the relationship between players and fans

Darron Gibson’s dalliance with Twitter was short and brutal. The Manchester United midfielder and Republic of Ireland international joined the platform at midday on April 25th, 2011 and shut down his account 97 minutes later, without posting a tweet. In that short window he was tarred and feathered by people who identified themselves as United fans.

“Your performance on Saturday was one of the worst I’ve seen from any utd player,” read one post; “u offer nothing to united. Do us all a favour and hand in a transfer request, u spud,” read another; “you are an abysmal excuse for a footballer – you’re a one trick pony – a shit one at that,” and on it went, a putrid parade of abuse.

Around that time, Twitter’s relationship with sport had still not fully crystallised. People thought it might be a good thing; or, at least, more good than bad. Earlier that week, Wayne Rooney had joined the platform and within 48 hours had amassed an astonishing 200,000 followers. After Rio Ferdinand announced Gibson’s arrival on Twitter, 12,000 followers poured in, essentially in one lunch hour.

The sweetheart narrative was that Twitter would collapse the distance between Premier League footballers in their gilded cages and millions of fans who wanted to feel a connection. That reservoir of contact, though, was quickly polluted. On Twitter, some so-called fans turned into the Kathy Bates character from Misery.

A few days after Gibson quit the platform, Danny Gabbidon, a West Ham player at the time, was charged by the FA for a salty, retaliatory tweet against his own team’s supporters. In Twitter’s Garden of Eden, there were serpents everywhere and an endless supply of forbidden fruit.

On March 21st, 2006, one of Twitter’s cofounders, Jack Dorsey, posted the first tweet, with no way of knowing what he was doing. Twitter entangled itself in everything under the sun but over the last 20 years its relationship with sport soared and soured and landed in a place of war and peace.

It became a global, round-the-clock, vector for instant updates and hot takes and breaking news and vitriol and humour and blinding stats and character assassination and falsehoods and insight and video clips and conversations and shouting matches and irreconcilable differences.

Ultimately, though, the only way it could be trusted was with suspicion. How does that work?

In many ways, however, Twitter shares sport’s temperament: it is volatile and inflamed by opinions, worthwhile and worthless. It is never cold. There is never a last word.

“There was an element that the discourse around sport [on Twitter] became more emotional and immediate and less editorial,” says Gary Sinclair from Dublin City University (DCU). “That’s why Twitter aligns really well with sport. You have these short instantaneous tweets reacting to sport, which [in itself] is instantaneous and emotional. The downside is, the structure of the social media platform itself really lends itself to abuse, and it has gone beyond toxic.”

Sinclair is head of the international network for online harms in sport, which is hosted by the Business School in DCU. In recent years he has been part of two major research projects analysing the abuse of athletes on social media.

One of them, which was commissioned by Tackling Online Hate in Football, focused on eight European championships, men’s and women’s, since 2008. The other research project was funded by FIA, the global governing body for motorsport, and a leading player in the United Against Online Abuse coalition; for that project Sinclair and a team of researchers examined almost 200 sports.

Their investigation of the European football championships focused exclusively on Twitter. The data set came to roughly 50 million tweets, about 22 million of which were in English. Using machine learning they were able to detect instances of hate speech such as racism, homophobia, ableism and sexism.

“We knew it was going to be bad before we went through it,” says Sinclair, “but I think we were surprised by how bad it is. Roughly 1 per cent of the tweets about the European Championships, both men’s and women’s in that period, contained hate speech or abusive speech. One per cent of 50 million tweets is quite a lot [500,000].

“That’s even worse when you consider we only have access to all the tweets that have official hashtags. You can imagine the extent of the abuse that is actually around these tournaments for people not using official hashtags. The extent of it constantly shocks me.”

As an extension of that research, they interviewed 163 professional footballers in Britain, from the top of the pyramid to academy players. To widen the lens, they also interviewed a spectrum of coaches, agents, journalists and safeguarding professionals and surveyed 2,000 fans, across Ireland and the UK. Part of what they discovered was a disturbing normalisation of how online abuse was processed by its targets and victims.

“In the context of professional football, they just internalise it,” says Sinclair. “We were talking to academy kids and they’re just like, ‘this is part of the job’. They’re being trained essentially to deal with this.

“For professional footballers now, you have to internalise it and pretend it doesn’t bother you. They probably have to do that because, psychologically, if they were to stop and read everything that was written about them in that way, they’d all have mental breakdowns.

“The clubs that have a lot of money are dealing with this issue as a sports science problem. They’re thinking, ‘If we can deal with this in a really good way their performance will actually be better and we can get 1 per cent here’. Publicly, they’re all looking at the moral aspect of it and saying ‘We have to deal with this’. But the reality is they’re looking for the small margins.”

What their research also highlighted was inadequate supports: athletes who challenge discrimination are more likely to receive online hate, but don’t feel “comfortable or empowered” to discuss how it has impacted them. “This is explained by a lack of faith that anything can be done and not wanting to look weak,” the report concluded.

It goes beyond players too: their research showed that 73 per cent of fans had received online abuse from other football fans. “Fans are often framed in the media and research as perpetrators,” wrote Sinclair. “However, they are also the group that is most widely affected by online abuse.”

Football is the biggest sport in the world but online abuse in sport has no boundaries and is no respecter of scale. Sinclair came across abuse of League of Ireland players from outside this jurisdiction that was basically linked to gambling. “They might have done something that upset an accumulator for some guy in Norway.”

Twitter was banned in China in 2009, but they have indigenous social media platforms. Weibo is the one with the closest likeness to Twitter. Even in a country where freedoms of speech are restricted, abuse of sportspeople is still a scourge.

“It’s a huge problem with table tennis,” says Sinclair. “Chinese scholars, who are being funded by the Chinese government, have contacted us to look at this because it’s a huge sport in China and because of that it has huge political and social impacts.

“We ended up looking at about 200 different sports around the world. [Online abuse] is a big problem in skiing, it’s a big problem in motorsport, sports you’d never think of.”

In Gaelic games, research in this field is in its infancy. Four years ago, the former Westmeath hurler Tommy Doyle produced a significant body of work for a postgraduate dissertation. At the time he was working in the Gaelic Player Association’s (GPA’s) communication and social media department and 2,134 of the GPA’s membership agreed to be surveyed. The headline outcomes of Doyle’s research were that one in four male intercounty players had experienced online abuse, and that its biggest source was Twitter.

“The big thing I noticed was how it affected the families and friends and girlfriends and boyfriends,” says Doyle. “That was the big thing. A lot of the time, the players were understanding that this was part and parcel of the game. For a lot of the players – not all of them – they were able to control the environment by removing themselves from social media or those conversations.

“But it was like the elephant in the room. The players knew sometimes that something was going on by the way a family member was asking questions – how they were feeling and stuff like that. They knew something was going on in the background.”

The GAA and the GPA developed guidelines for players in consultation with an expert in this field from UK Cricket. According to Doyle, the guidelines were more about online “hygiene”: don’t post something that might sabotage a job application years down the line, spook a potential sponsor or make you look like something less than a role model. It was better not to learn those lessons from experience.

“When I was growing up I thought Twitter was just for celebrities or whatever,” says Doyle, “but when I got on to the senior intercounty panel I set up a Twitter page – I would have been 18 or 19. Maybe it was a bit of ego as well – I’m going playing intercounty and someone might have an interest in what I think.

“I got annoyed with some comments, but I was probably in the wrong place looking for that. I know lads in my own dressingroom would have got too hooked up on that and would have taken a lot of stuff to heart and maybe it affected their mindset.”

The toxicity of the platform has intensified since it was bought by Elon Musk in October 2022. In response, users left in their droves. However, as recently as 2023, X – as Twitter was renamed – claimed 43 per cent of their users visited the platform primarily for sport.

There was another surge of defections after the scandal about Grok and AI-generated sexual imagery exploded at the beginning of this year. Federations such as Swim Ireland and Paralympics Ireland closed their accounts, as did Sport England. In response to a query this week, Sport Ireland said: “X will not be used as a routine or primary communications channel at this time.” Other federations, though, and thousands of clubs around the country held their noses and carried on.

X is still flooded with sport, in all the ways it always has been: useful, instant, hare-brained, poisonous, enlightened, dingy, fractious.

A couple of days after his fling with Twitter and their acrimonious break-up, Gibson lined out for United in the semi-final of the Champions League, away to Schalke in Germany. In a 2-0 win, he made the first goal and scored the second. A colony of United fans tried to get him back on Twitter.

Wisely, he ignored their pleas. It wasn’t cut out for everyone.