Manchester United forward Marcus Rashford is racially abused following his team’s defeat in the Europa League final to Villarreal FC.
The footballer says he received “at least 70 racial slurs” on his social media accounts since Wednesday’s match. The main game, played at Gdansk in Poland, ended in a 1-1 draw, leading it into penalties. The final score was a 11-10 loss to United.
In response, Rashford tweeted, “For those working to make me feel any worse than I already do, good luck trying.”
The club posted a Tweet afterwards saying their players were subject to “disgraceful racist abuse”.
The thing that “most outraged” the footballer is that one of the abusers sending him a direct message looked like a teacher. He couldn’t believe that someone who teaches children thought they could so easily send out racial abuse without consequence. The offending account appears to no longer exist now, but the abuse is reported to the police.
A spokesperson for the club says they condemn the behaviour, for which there is no excuse. “Everyone at Manchester United is disgusted by the online hate and abuse aimed at Marcus and other players on social media”. The football club have a zero tolerance policy on racism and discrimination, and encourage people to report any instances. They have a reporting system on their website where fans can flag up any online abuse.
Stronger measures needed against abuse
In addition, people urge social media platforms and regulatory bodies to strengthen their measures to prevent such “disgusting behaviour”. In a stand for firms to take a stronger stance against racist and sexist abuse, a number of people in the sporting world recently took part in a four day boycott of social media.
Although in April, Instagram introduced a new filtering tool to enable users to automatically separate out abusive messages from people they do not follow. They urge people to make use of the safety features to help decrease their experiences of abuse.
However, this is not the first time England player Rashford has suffered this kind of abuse. He spoke previously in January about seeing “humanity and social media at its worst”. This was following racial abuse after a 0-0 draw with Arsenal.
United say there was a 350% increase in abuse targeting their players this month. Additionally, there were 3,300 abusive posts between September 2019 and February 2021. Meanwhile, a number of other players in English football have also received online discrimination. There is clearly a wider issue across all of football, and sport in general.
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