In today’s game, loyalty doesn’t last long. One mistake, one bad night, and the same fans who posted a player’s highlights last week are now flooding that same player’s DMs with death threats.
Social media has changed how fans interact with sports—for the worse. Fueled by anonymity, many fans have transformed their enthusiasm into unacceptable harassment and dehumanization of players. Online attacks include AI deepfakes that overlay players onto nauseating and gruesome videos, threats via direct messages, and hateful comments on their social media posts.
In recent years, that volatility has erupted beyond mere words. In 2022, Manchester United defender Harry Maguire had his home searched by police officers after a bomb threat from an enraged fan. While bomb threats are rare in sports, violent threats have become increasingly common, and constant exposure has slowly numbed people to their severity. So when it happened to Maguire, many fans barely reacted, revealing a new form of fandom so consumed by passion that it punishes its own players for the smallest mistakes—in his case, a string of defensive errors during the club’s worst stretch in years.
Sports betting has also intensified the persecution of athletes, especially post-2018 in the United States, when Congress struck down the federal Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992, which had effectively banned sports betting in all states outside Nevada. One of the most popular betting options is player props, where fans can wager on a player’s performance. Once money gets tied in, bettors’ emotions intensify, which can lead to degrading comments and videos if a player’s poor performance causes them to lose their bets.
In August, Ukrainian tennis player and world number 14 Elina Svitolina lost a quarterfinal match at the National Bank Open in Montreal. After the match, she posted to social media screenshots of sickening messages she received from enraged sports bettors that included slurs, death and sexual assault threats, and attacks on her nationality. A report from the Women’s Tennis Association found that angry gamblers accounted for roughly 40% of all online abuse against their athletes.
These threats don’t come out of nowhere; they come from a culture that treats athletes as entertainment commodities instead of human beings—a distinction that social media has eroded even more. Players are expected to perform, impress, and produce constantly, and when they fall short, their own “fans” will smear them online. Betting platforms knowingly drive this obsession further, turning every yard, every ace, every shot into a bet that is tied as much to emotion as to money.
Anonymity on social media emboldens this cruelty. Being able to hide behind a screen and a private profile allows users to spout ridiculous claims and assertions regarding athletes without facing consequences. Until social media platforms enforce real boundaries and take personal threats seriously, the same toxicity will continue to spill into our sports.
