By Iacovos Iacovides, The Sports Financial Literacy Academy
Social media platforms help connect people globally, allowing users to share pictures, follow athletes, and engage with friends. However, a dark side exists, including bullying, body-shaming, hate, racism, and abuse. Celebrities are often the primary targets of these online attacks, turning this issue into an epidemic. If you check comments on an athlete’s post, negativity is inevitable, with consequences like anxiety, depression, and poor performances.
Social media platforms are specifically designed to be addictive. Engineers and psychologists work tirelessly to ensure users spend more time online. These multi-billion-dollar entities exploit our brain’s reward system, using dopamine hits to keep users engaged. The problem is that only real human interaction can ease stress, depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Human connection is vital for comfort and joy, but social media interactions rarely fulfil this need.
Athletes, especially those with international recognition, cannot afford to avoid social media. It brings commercial opportunities, visibility, and financial considerations. For some solo athletes, social media is their primary income source. Unfortunately, these athletes constantly face online attacks for poor performances or minor mistakes. Though it’s hard to sympathize with wealthy athletes, many are under 25 years old and still teenagers.
When Maradona scored his famous goal in 1986, there was no social media for English fans to attack him. In 2005, Shevchenko missed his penalty kick, and there were no Twitter trolls to ridicule him. In the early 2000s, criticism came mainly from TV pundits and journalists. Now, however, social media is flooded with abusive comments, making things much worse for athletes facing public criticism.
Take the England trio, Rashford, Sancho, and Saka, who missed penalties in the Euro 2020 final. These athletes received thousands of racially abusive messages on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The mental impact must have been enormous. Not only did they miss key penalty kicks, but they also had to endure online attacks from faceless internet users. It’s a new, cruel reality athletes face.
The issue isn’t just historical; modern examples are plentiful. South Korean archer An San received mocking tweets for her short hair. Japanese table tennis champion Jun Mizutani received online death threats despite winning gold medals. Online abuse affects athletes globally, making their achievements and personal lives difficult to navigate. A single negative comment can outweigh hundreds of positive ones.
You might receive hundreds of positive comments throughout the day, but just one abusive and ill-conceived message is enough to ruin your day. Pickswise has analysed tweets sent to athletes. The results were astonishing vis-à-vis online abuse. Indicatively, in the span of 12 months, LeBron James received approximately 123,000 abusive messages, Tom Brady 28,000 and Cristiano Ronaldo 12,000.
Phil Jones of Manchester United opened up about mental health and social media a few months ago in an interview with UTD podcast. “I stepped away from social media a long time ago, but it’s difficult because all your friends read it, your family read it […] I know as a young player, that’s the first thing you do: you come off the game and you want to see what people are saying about you [on social media]. But when you strip it all back it doesn’t really matter what they say because they’re not picking the team”.
Phil Jones knows a lot about this as he used to be a weekly target for trolls. But he has a point. There are ways to protect yourself. First of all, there are software programs that can help delete or hide such messages. Secondly, you can turn off notifications and/ or avoid social media right after a bad game/ performance. West Ham Untied captain and England international, Declan Rice, admitted doing this before and during the European championship last summer and felt that it boosted his confidence. Thirdly, you can hand control of your social media to your PR team; not always, but during periods where hateful messages are more likely to surge. Most importantly, if you’ve experienced abuse, anxiety, depression or any other mental health related issues, do not hesitate to seek help. As Naomi Osaka said, “it’s ok not to be ok”.
The Money Smart Athlete® Blog is established and run by the Sports Financial Literacy Academy® (SFLA). Through its education programs the SFLA has the vision to financially educate and empower athletes of all ages to become better people, not just better athletes. For more information on our courses, our SFLA Approved Trainer Program®, and how they can benefit you and your clients, please get in touch with us at [email protected].