FIFA's Social Media Learnings Miss the Mark

In December, FIFA and FIFPRO (the global players’ association) jointly released a report on social media abuse directed at the players, coaches, teams and officials participating in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

697 players and coaches participated in the study by having the posts and comments directed to their social media accounts monitored and in some cases moderated. With 32 teams competing with 23-player rosters and assuming 5 coaches per team, this equates to ~75-80% of all players and coaches at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup participating in the study.

Key findings of the report included:

• 1 in 5 players at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup were targeted with discriminatory, abusive or threatening messaging.
• Homophobic, sexual and sexist abuse accounted for almost 50% of detected, verified abusive messages.
• Players at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup were 29% more likely to be targeted with online abuse compared with men’s players at the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
• Women’s players at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup were almost twice as likely as men’s players at the 2022 FIFA World Cup to be targeted with homophobic messaging.
• U.S. Women’s National Team players were targeted more than any other country with over 2x the amount of abusive posts and comments than the next closest team, Argentina.

Yes, this is disturbing. What was even more disturbing were FIFA and FIFPRO’s learnings on what to do better next time. This list effectively amounts to:

1. Making FIFA’s Social Media Protection Service, which does the monitoring and moderating of player, coach, team and official social media accounts, more effective.
2. Recommending that players turn off the ability for other users to comment on their social media accounts during major tournaments like the World Cup.
3. Asking politicians not to post or comment about the World Cup as politician posts tend to trigger large spikes of abuse from their political opponents.

Why is this disturbing? Because the recommendations center on creating a bubble where the hate and the abuse can’t get in. That is way too low of a bar to set. The bar is eliminating hate and abuse directed at anyone who plays, coaches, officiates, works in or cheers for soccer / football. So it’s disturbing that none of the recommendations actually address eliminating the hate and the abuse.

Eliminating hate and abuse are much more difficult than improving monitoring & moderating software, toggling a setting on a social media app and sending a memo requesting politicians to not post or comment about the World Cup. Eliminating hate and abuse would first require FIFA to do the hard work of introspection to root out the rot within their own ranks and to reimagine a vision that is inclusive, welcoming and equitable for all players, coaches, officials, teams and fans. To date, FIFA has shown an utter lack of awareness that they need to take on this work and zero capability to actually do so.

Take the following examples from 2023 alone. How can the levels of hateful and abusive messages - especially those of a sexist, sexual or homophobic bent - directed at the women who competed in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup be surprising when:

• FIFA President Gianni Infantino makes comments at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup that women need to “pick the right battles” to “convince us, men, what we have to do” and says that women should “just push the doors, they are open”.
• FIFA takes 6 days amid growing criticism to provisionally suspend Spanish federation president Luis Rubiales following his unsolicited kiss of Jennifer Hermoso during the trophy ceremony at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
• FIFA awards $110m in total prize money at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, a quarter of the $440m FIFA awarded to the men at the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
• FIFA bans the One Love armband in support of LGBTQ+ rights at both the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup and the men’s 2022 FIFA World Cup.
• FIFA only invited male players aged 15+ to participate in a series of training sessions hosted in Australia for 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup match officials throughout the tournament … and when a women’s team still showed up they were excluded from participating.

The failure of FIFA to address its own behavior creates a world in which directing sexist, sexual and homophobic hate and abuse at women’s players is acceptable. Instead of working to create a hate and abuse-free bubble, FIFA needs to pop its own bubble of hate and abuse to in turn decrease the hate and abuse directed at women’s players.