Remember: Decent football fans are still in the majority despite the toilet noise | OneFootball

A recent BBC investigation found that over the course of one single weekend in the Premier League and WSL, more than 2,000 abusive messages, including death and rape threats, were sent to players and managers on social media. And I’m sure other leagues elsewhere would produce similar results.

To a degree you can understand people venting their dislike of mendacious politicians’ decisions or of loudmouth, hate-promoting, frog-faced bullsh*tters; their decisions have real impact in a way an underperforming left-back really doesn’t.

But a climate of hate is being fostered that recruits from the same cohort: a right-wing approach to paint everything as rubbish and decent people as devils. You’ve got people saying London is more dangerous than any American city, when the exact opposite is factually true. But lying is a default for these people. It’s not a campaign as such, just a hive mind whose purpose seems to be to prepare the ground for a totalitarian, fascist takeover, which they assume you will make everything brilliant. It’s happening in real time.

Given this atmosphere is a dominant one in some circles, issuing a death threat to your goalkeeper is just normal. This is a situation where some attention-hungry ex-footballers apparently believe that free speech means they should be able to threaten and slander anyone without consequence, unless it’s done to them, presumably. The proponents of free speech always seem to be the most sensitive about the limits of free speech when it comes to criticism of themselves. Snowflakes.

It is ever-present and probably has been in one form or another for decades; the only difference now is that thoughtless ignorance is being told it’s as valid as studied intellect and that being intelligent and informed is just elitist. So we get booing at players taking a knee and a myriad of other displays of intolerance. It’s all born from the same dumb seed.

It might be a noisy minority but they are the loudest voices and their algorithms reward hate and aggression. The problem is that football by its very nature is confrontational and aggressive and has lived off a p*ss-take culture as long as I’ve been alive. For example, I was beaten up aged nine for supporting the dirty Leeds v Chelsea in the 1970 FA Cup final, not because I opposed the Londoners but because Leeds were seen as rather tenuous rivals of Middlesbrough. That was 55 years ago. Have we progressed at all?.

This problem can be tackled with effective legislation to a degree but primarily, change has to come from the ground up, otherwise the mouth-breathers will just protest that they’re being oppressed by being told how to behave by an elite. How can anything change when their playgrounds are owned and geared by the same brand of people?

Football throws us all together and so we mix with people we might not normally. As an example, I was at a game recently, far from a high-profile clash, and stood amongst these – I don’t know how to describe them really – abusers, perhaps. Not just vocally, though they hadn’t a good word to say about anything and anyone, but judging by the time they spent on their phones and their interactions with each other, online too.

I’m now disabled and one thing I can’t do these days is run away from trouble, which was my preferred exit strategy in my younger days, so I was in for a kicking if I upset these men (it’s always men).

But even if I was able-bodied, there was no way I could have affected change with these people and that’s how hard it is to have any impact on behaviour. Eventually, the worst three of these men were thrown out by stewards, something I’ve rarely seen before, and you know what? Everyone cheered as they were dragged out.

So it wasn’t just little sensitive me who thought it was unacceptable. Hundreds of others did too. So it’s easy to despair but most people feel the same; we’re the majority, even if the liars say we’re not just because they’re all shouting into a toilet on X and mistaking the echo for agreement. People just don’t know how to stop it.

Perhaps the best thing we can do is just not be co-opted into the broader toxic cultures that feed this behaviour and if by any chance we know someone is sending rape threats, try and highlight what a monumentally stupid, not to say illegal, thing it is to do.

I’ve found that humorous mockery is your best weapon because such people often have very thin skins. It is hard though. Most of us would like to see a de-escalation of the current situation. And most of us would like to see football not being used as a toilet to fill with vile negativity.