The challenge
Online abuse in football is often discussed as though it were one problem. In practice, its form changes across teams, tournaments and audiences. Effective campaigns need evidence about who is being targeted, what kind of hostility is being expressed and which responses are most likely to encourage reflection rather than further polarisation.
The approach
For EE and BT’s Hope United work during the UEFA Women’s EURO 2022, HateLab and nisien.ai analysed posts directed towards England players. The study examined 78,141 posts across Twitter, Reddit and 4chan. More than 50,000 were positive, while 380 were identified as sexist or homophobic. The data informed campaign communications and personalised shirt designs that visualised the online experiences of participating players.
The work continued around the 2022 men’s World Cup. Analysis of 847,370 posts directed towards players from England and Wales identified approximately 200 posts as homophobic or racist. Of the hate speech found, 88% was anti-LGB and 11% anti-Black.
Those findings challenged assumptions that racism would necessarily be the dominant form of abuse. The evidence and advice on effective counter-narratives helped inform EE’s GayVAR campaign, which used humour and familiar football language to encourage fans to call out homophobic hate.
The outcome
The projects translated large-scale analysis into accessible public interventions. Campaign teams could speak about online abuse with credible evidence, respond to developments during tournaments and focus their creative work on the harms the data showed were most prevalent.
They also demonstrated the importance of examining positive speech alongside abuse. The Women’s Euros analysis found far more hope than hate, creating a more accurate account of the online environment while still documenting the harm experienced by players.
The combined work provides a model for evidence-led campaigning: measure the problem, understand its context, identify an appropriate behavioural response and evaluate how public communication can support healthier norms.