By @user handle loser.
@user handle lazy and overrated.
@user handle is a wife beater.
@user handle why don’t you talk about your rape allegations.
@user handle is really bad, I have no idea why he even has fans!
“Where have you been these past few days? Why can’t I see you? I wish you would walk past that corner.”
Are these the messages of a cruel enemy? No — they are messages from followers and “admirers” of elite athletes, posted on social media, particularly on Twitter.
by Sandro Angulo
In this post, we contextualize a growing phenomenon: the rise of online hate speech targeting elite athletes, which challenges the boundaries between freedom of expression and punishable forms of communication.
In April 1993, Serbia’s Monica Seles and Germany’s Steffi Graf were battling for supremacy in women’s tennis. Graf had won eight of the nine Grand Slam tournaments played between 1988 and early 1990, before Seles burst onto the women’s tour and captured eight of the next twelve. Their titles and their rivalry catapulted them to stardom… and into danger.
That is exactly what happened. At an event in Hamburg, Günter Parche, an obsessive fan of Graf, ran onto the court where Seles was playing against Bulgaria’s Magdalena Maleeva. He stabbed Seles between the shoulder blades before being restrained. The physical and emotional toll on the attacked player forced her to step away from competitive tennis for more than two years. Seles, who had seemed destined to win dozens of major titles, would claim only one more in her career. Graf, twenty-two.
This episode was recalled by journalist Charlie Eccleshare of The Athletic. His feature story, “The epicenter of stalking in sports? Why tennis stands apart,” revisits the harassment suffered by the Serbian player 32 years ago, at a time when the internet was only beginning to emerge. Today, however, it reads as a warning about the dangers athletes face due to the combination of unbalanced fans and the misuse of social media. The growth of these online platforms and the expectation that elite athletes should remain accessible to their followers—encouraged and often imposed by brands, clubs, and marketing practices—appear to have only intensified this parasocial relationship within the realm of postmodern sport.
Scholars refer to these behaviors as online hate speech, an interdisciplinary subject of study situated in the tension between two legal concepts: freedom of expression and punishable speech. Evidence, however, suggests that such conduct can inflict physical and psycho-emotional harm on athletes, to the point of negatively affecting performance and even causing mental health disorders.
Authors Jenny Meggs and Wasim Ahmed, in Applying cognitive analytic theory to understand the abuse of athletes on Twitter, define it as speech that incites or promotes hatred, violence, and discrimination against an individual or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, among other social categories. Its capacity to cause harm is amplified through the use of the internet and social networks, which enable repeated, systematic, and uncontrollable strategies from which targets cannot easily protect themselves.
According to Nancy Willard in Cybersafe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Kids: Helping Young People Learn to Use the Internet Safely and Responsibly, there are seven distinct types of online hate speech: flaming (sending threatening or rude messages), harassment (repeatedly sending offensive messages), denigration (posting rumors or disinformation), cyberstalking (expanded harassment that includes harmful threats), impersonation (pretending to be someone else in order to shame or discredit them), trickery (revealing sensitive information to others), and exclusion (intentionally excluding someone from an online community or group). Moreover, in each category, acts of hate are understood as behaviors that serve the dual purpose of denigrating a target while fostering an environment of hostility toward a broader collective.
Race and gender are the stereotypes most frequently used as excuses to insult athletes when they make mistakes during competition, achieve success, or display behaviors considered socially unacceptable. The first case involved England national team footballers Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka, who missed three penalties against Italy in the UEFA EURO 2020 final at London’s Wembley Stadium. Some users blamed them for the 3–2 loss to the Italians and hurled racist abuse at them on social media because of their Black identity—acts condemned by the leading governing bodies of world football. As a result, 11 arrests were made for various offenses, including sending malicious communications and violating Section 127 of the United Kingdom’s 2003 Communications Act.
The second case, examined in the study A Space of One’s Own? The Tensions of Being Visible on Instagram for Turkish Female Athletes by İrem Kavasoğlu and colleagues, analyzes how Turkish female athletes—living in a secular country with a Muslim-majority population—often confront patriarchal religious norms while also being exposed to forms of cyberviolence common in Western contexts, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny, sexual harassment, physical threats, and sexual propositions.
Turkish women who posted photos of their athletic bodies on Instagram were subjected to persistent sexual cyberharassment by male fans using fake accounts, as well as continuous stalking that began on social media and extended into the physical world, causing psychological trauma, paranoia, and fear. Mavi, one of the athletes interviewed, recounted receiving an Instagram message that terrified her two or three years ago: someone had taken a photograph of her home and sent it to her via direct message, asking, “Where have you been these past few days? Why can’t I see you? I wish you would walk past that corner.”
Dolunay, another interviewee, said she had changed her route from training to home, opting for a longer but seemingly safer path. Meanwhile, her teammates Beren and Su noted that these threats occasionally affected their athletic performance: “While I was training, I kept looking up at the stands to see if he had arrived; I was paranoid. Sometimes this affected my performance during training because I always had that fear in my mind” (Beren). “After 8 p.m., a friend or my father would drive me home. If they couldn’t, I wouldn’t go home after that hour. I also told my mother to watch me from the balcony; I would tell her when I was turning onto our street. This was traumatic for me” (Mavi).
As reported by journalist Charlie Eccleshare of The Athletic, athletes across all sports deal with obsessive individuals, but women’s tennis has been—and continues to be—the epicenter of the problem. This is because the sport has particular characteristics that make its players targets of harassment regardless of the era: “precocity, attractiveness, and visibility,” noted one source interviewed by the reporter.
Tennis, Eccleshare adds, has always inspired an exceptional level of devotion toward its stars, and no other sport has produced as many female icons. Whether in the ATP (men’s) or WTA (women’s) circuits, many fans define themselves by supporting one player and opposing their rival—much like the deranged Günter Parche, who idolized Graf and despised Seles.
What Is the Profile of Harassers?
The psychosocial framework most frequently applied in health and education to study cyberviolence and online hate speech is the socioecological theory, which emphasizes the idea that behavior occurs within a multifaceted social context. Several arguments help explain the uncivil—at the very least—and often criminal behaviors exhibited by fans who become obsessively fixated on athletes, their performance, and their personal lives.
- Perpetrators feel comfortable expressing their hostility because doing so can elicit support and admiration from their peers, even if it also draws condemnation from others. Researchers refer to this theoretical perspective as the influence of community ethos in fostering online environments.
- Researchers argue that anonymity is key to creating an atmosphere in which users feel empowered to express hostility online—behavior that would be entirely unacceptable in offline settings.
- From the socioecological perspective, fans may be motivated by intense anxiety or negative emotions rooted in their strong identification with, and investment in, the performance of the teams they support. This emotional intensity often resembles what individuals experience within intimate relationships.
- Harassers commonly perceive elite athletes as possessing greater power or higher social and economic status, which they use to justify targeting them with abusive comments. In other words, fans feel entitled and morally justified in displacing violent emotions onto athletes because they believe these athletes enjoy a higher socioeconomic status than most people. Additionally, the perception of superhuman qualities can further contribute to the dehumanization of elite athletes.
- There is a strong correlation between sensation-seeking and the use of social media, meaning that fans may turn to these platforms to fulfill socioemotional needs and to cathartically release negative feelings such as tension, frustration, and anger.
- Sports fans who engage in online abuse are often driven by the “black sheep effect,” a psychological tendency to judge their idols more harshly when they deviate legally, ethically, or morally—for example, when players are caught evading taxes, driving under the influence, or being linked to various forms of violence toward others.
Socioecological theory also suggests that comments such as fans’ negative tweets about athletic failures function as potent forms of criticism capable of undermining athletes’ self-esteem. This is reflected in the words of English footballer Jude William Bellingham, a midfielder for Real Madrid, who explained to the Laureus Awards the impact that social media has had on his life: “Everyone has the right to have an opinion about sport, but there should be limits to the horrible things people are allowed to say.” He admits that, over time, he has stopped reading such comments in order to safeguard his mental health.
What to Do
It is not inherently wrong for athletes to have social media accounts. However, using them continuously—posting updates about training schedules or sharing outings to places with fewer people than one would find in a stadium—makes them easier targets for cyberviolence. Even in stadiums and during competition, some harassers position themselves only a few meters from elite athletes and find ways to insult them or voice various types of insinuations.
What, then, should be done? Closing social media accounts is not always the best option, although in extreme cases it remains advisable. There will always be respectful users who express admiration and offer moderate criticism. Moreover, it is true that fans seek an authentic relationship with athletes, and athletes often take joy in being recognized for their achievements and supported in their defeats.
An alternative for clubs and coaches is to implement assistance protocols during moments of vulnerability, as well as training sessions on the use of social media—not only to learn how to share or tag information using each platform’s conventions, but also to develop a deeper understanding of hostile fan behaviors and to learn to assign these interactions their proper value. For example, celebrities have revealed that even when they receive hundreds of positive messages, a single intimidating or rude comment can be enough to ruin their day.
It is also necessary to create strategies for protecting athletes from negative attacks and to understand the factors that trigger violent reactions from fans, particularly those elements that athletes and sports communication teams can monitor and manage.
Finally, educating athletes on safe travel planning and on the appropriateness of sharing certain aspects of their daily lives can help reduce the risk of abusive trolling within the digital ecosystem.
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References
Eccleshare, C. (2025, August 14). The epicenter of stalking in sports? Why tennis stands apart (¿El epicentro del acoso en el deporte? Por qué el tenis se diferencia). The Athletic. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6456273/2025/08/14/tennis-stalking-cases-players-history/
Kavasoğlu, İ., Eratlı Şirin, Y., & Uğurlu, A. (2024). A Space of One’s Own? The Tensions of Being Visible on Instagram for Turkish Female Athletes (¿Un espacio propio? Las tensiones de ser visibles en Instagram para las deportistas turcas). Communication and Sport, 12(2), 347–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795231154913
Kearns, C., Sinclair, G., Black, J., Doidge, M., Fletcher, T., Kilvington, D., Liston, K., Lynn, T., & Rosati, P. (2023). A Scoping Review of Research on Online Hate and Sport (Una revisión exploratoria de la investigación sobre el odio en línea y el deporte). Communication and Sport, 11(2), 402–430. https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795221132728
López, S. (10 de octubre de 2025). “He intentado mantener esa imagen de ‘atleta macho’, pero necesito a gente”. As Deportes. https://as.com/futbol/primera/he-intentado-mantener-esa-imagen-de-atleta-macho-pero-necesito-a-gente-f202510-n/
Meggs, J., & Ahmed, W. (2024). Applying cognitive analytic theory to understand the abuse of athletes on Twitter (Aplicación de la teoría analítico-cognitiva para comprender el abuso hacia deportistas en Twitter). Managing Sport and Leisure, 29(1), 161–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/23750472.2021.2004210
