Marking the International Day for Tolerance, FIFA says its Social Media Protection Service has flagged more than 30,000 abusive posts in 2025, but new ticket blacklists and law-enforcement referrals still reach only a small number of identified offenders.
FIFA has ramped up its response to online abuse by combining its social media monitoring programme with ticket bans and police referrals, but the latest figures show only a small fraction of offenders are facing real-world sanctions.
Marking the UN’s International Day for Tolerance, world football’s governing body said its Social Media Protection Service (SMPS) had flagged more than 30,000 abusive posts to social media platforms for review and removal since the start of 2025.
That takes the total to over 65,000 posts escalated to platforms since the tool was launched in 2022.
For the first time, FIFA has confirmed that individuals identified as responsible for “highly abusive behaviour” are being blacklisted from purchasing tickets for future FIFA tournaments and events.
It has also reported 11 people in Argentina, Brazil, France, Poland, Spain, the UK and the US to law-enforcement authorities this year, with one case escalated to Interpol.
From monitoring to punishment
The SMPS was initially rolled out around the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and has since been expanded across FIFA competitions.
According to figures published in June, the service has analysed 33 million posts and comments on 15,302 accounts across 23 tournaments, qualifiers and friendlies, hiding more than ten million abusive comments from public view. It has been permanently available to all 211 FIFA Member Associations and their players since 2024.
Until now, most of the emphasis has been on detection and moderation: scanning public accounts linked to players, teams and officials, automatically hiding abusive replies where consent has been given, and reporting content that breaches platform terms to the tech companies themselves.
The new update adds a more punitive layer. When posts cross a certain threshold, FIFA says it will both pass information to national justice systems and block offenders from buying tickets for its events.
On announcing the latest figures, FIFA President Gianni Infantino said football “must be a safe and inclusive space on the pitch, in the stands and online”, and promised that the organisation would continue to work with member associations, confederations and law-enforcement authorities “to hold offenders accountable.”
Club World Cup offers a snapshot of scale
The inaugural 32-team FIFA Club World Cup in the US has become the showcase for the enhanced system.
During the tournament, SMPS monitored 2,401 active accounts across five social media platforms, covering players, coaches, teams and match officials from 72 nationalities. Over the course of the event it analysed 5.9 million posts, flagged 179,517 for review and reported 20,587 to the relevant platforms.
Those numbers help explain the scale and the limits of the model. Millions of posts are screened, a smaller proportion are identified as potentially abusive, a smaller subset again are deemed to breach platform rules and sent on for action, and only a very small number of offenders currently find themselves in front of police or on FIFA’s blacklist.
In its June update, FIFA said that abusive content breaking platform terms had already triggered “concrete actions, including account suspensions”, though it has not published a breakdown by platform or offence type.
Part of a wider regulatory landscape
FIFA’s moves come as governments and regulators place heavier obligations on platforms to deal with illegal and harmful content, including hate speech and threats.
In the UK, the Online Safety Act creates a duty of care for large platforms to assess and mitigate risks related to illegal content such as terrorism, hate speech and fraud, with potential fines running into a percentage of global turnover for failures to comply.
Across the European Union, the Digital Services Act introduces new mechanisms for users to flag illegal content and for platforms to cooperate with “trusted flaggers” on hate speech, including a revised Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online that sits within the DSA framework.
Against that backdrop, the SMPS and its new enforcement layer can be read as football’s attempt to show that it is not simply outsourcing the problem of online abuse to technology companies, but is also using its own disciplinary and commercial levers.
