FIFA: Over half of World Cup 2026 participants faced online abuse
FIFA’s SMPS tracked 1,606 players, coaches and officials; 812 received abusive messages and thousands of accounts were flagged or reported.
October 10, 2026 — More than half of the 1,606 players, coaches and officials monitored by FIFA's Social Media Protection Program (SMPS) during the 2026 World Cup this summer were targeted with online abuse, the organisation reported. A total of 812 of the 1,606 people tracked received at least one message that SMPS classified as abusive or malicious.
Scale and character of the attacks
Racism was the single most common form of discriminatory abuse, accounting for 12% of all recorded cases and rising to 20% when general insults are excluded. The individual who received the largest volume of attacks was the target of more than 10,000 abusive posts; about 40% of those posts were racist in nature.
SMPS analysed 17.1 million posts and comments, and roughly 240,000 of those were confirmed as abusive after human review. The monitoring flagged 2,905 accounts for further investigation, and 786 accounts were reported to law-enforcement agencies for review.
The moderation tool also scanned 60.7 million comments across FIFA’s official channels and those of member associations, hiding 9.2 million comments, including spam.
The findings cover the period of the tournament this summer and reflect the data-processing and enforcement activity undertaken by SMPS around World Cup 2026.
Report compiled / text: Marija Kovaceva
Photo: press material from the event
