If they want to end this terrible abuse, clubs must use the power they have and boycott social media

IN 1066 And All That, a seminal work of my childhood, historical events were divided into ‘ good things’ and ‘bad things’. But life has got more complicated since Sellar and Yeatman’s 1930 masterpiece. Take the internet for instance. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? The honest answer is both. How would we have coped with lockdown without it? How would I have remembered how to spell Sellar without Google?

But lots of people in football know it’s a bad thing. A really bad thing, with vile abuse everywhere.

Ask Steve Bruce, Newcastle’s warm-hearted, indeed cuddly, manager, who has received a volley of death threats, some of them directed to his son.

Or Mike Dean, a hugely experienced Premier League referee, who has asked not to be allocated a match this weekend because of all the death threats he has received. I won’t sail under false colours: Mike Dean is not a favourite of mine. But death threats? Count me out.

These two are, of course, white. Where it gets really awful is the vile abuse hurled at black players, totally unacceptable in a civilised country. Indeed, I would go further; until it is stamped out, we cannot consider ourselves civilised.

Lots of condemnatory words of course last week from the football authorities. But as my mother always maintained, fine words butter no parsnips. It’s firm and uncompromising action that’s necessary and you’re never going to get that from the FA. Nor is there any sign of anything effective from the Government, nor indeed the Premier League, their sponsors, or even from a lot of players, who themselves are addicted to the net.

Stalin allegedly observed (and he certainly would have known) one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.

So as an example of what black Premier League footballers have to put up with — 43 per cent of them from a recent Professional Footballers’ Association survey — let’s consider the case of Reece James. He’s just 21, yet already a fixture in the Chelsea team and capped four times for England where, of course, he was born. As regulars at Stamford Bridge, Reece has been a favourite of my sons and me since his breakthrough in 2019.

He has been at Chelsea since he was six; he is tough, resilient, determined and extremely skilful. An admirable professional as, by the way, is his sister Lauren at Manchester United, also the victim of really bad stuff.

Anyway, this admirable family, led by a dedicated father, is worthy of only our respect and affection. But Reece woke up one morning last month to a volley of abuse.

Some readers will be shocked, but you can’t understand the problem until you see it and ask yourself the inevitable question; how can such stuff be tolerated?

This was an Instagram message: ‘ F** k you, you face of monkey smelly trash. How can you f**king live with a dirty black skin.’

It was a message followed by a row of emojis picturing monkeys and a lot of vomiting, concluding, equally charmingly: ‘ Your face makes me feel so sick.’

I find this disgusting abuse aimed at an entirely estimable young man and his family deeply upsetting. But what really does bring a tear to my eye is that nothing will be done about it. The abuser will escape scot free. No one knows who he is and he will join a sizeable gang of racist perverts on the net who are serial offenders. The Government say they are publishing legislation. The trouble is, it does nothing to tackle the heart of the problem. I’ll come back to them and our Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden and turn to the platform hosts.

FACEBOOK, Instagram and Twitter are hugely experienced at ducking responsibility and doing nothing effective. There is little doubt that Sellar and Yeatman would consider Mark Zuckerberg a bad thing and they’d be right.

Reece’s abuser, even if they knew who he was, would probably not be taken offline, because Facebook think such abusers deserve a chance to mend their ways. Risible, but true.

But then Zuckerberg’s business is built on people l i ke t hat. As Professor Scott Galloway of New York University recently said: ‘Facebook’s business model is built on rage. It’s an unbelievable rage machine.’ Without rage, even utterly unacceptable rage, their business would suffer and that would never do.

Now for the Premier League. I don’t doubt their sincerity in deploring this kind of stuff, the question is, though, what will they actually do to make Zuckerberg and his fellow internet oligarchs think twice about being so tolerant of this muck? The answer is, of course, hit him in the money belt. Easier said than done, but not impossible to make a dent in Zuckerberg’s rampaging business.

The Premier League’s 20 clubs have 290 million-plus followers on Facebook, 162 million on Instagram and 105 million on YouTube. So why don’t the clubs, backed by their sponsors, announce a three-month boycott of social media to give it a chance to clean up its act?

After all, for a young lad like Reece James, the clubs are effectively in loco parentis and the damage that this kind of abuse does to the mental well-being of young footballers should never be underestimated.

Of course, the players themselves could as a group boycott social media, but the chances of that are slim. Football is, after all, a part- time job. Free after lunch most days, playing with Facebook etc is the modern equivalent to going down the snooker hall.

Now let’s get back to Mr Dowden. According to a PFA survey last summer, 43 per cent of t he professional footballers surveyed have been subjected to unacceptable abuse online. Far worse, the three most abused players, l ed by Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling, are those who have spoken out most forcefully against racial abuse.

But that has simply turned them into a more attractive target, because the abusers believe there is no downside for them. Operating anonymously, on slap-happy

The abusers believe there is no downside. It is a free lunch for racists

Only way to make these net oligarchs act is to hit them in the money belt

platforms that could, but don’t, take serious steps to identify who their customers really are, this is just a free lunch for racists. So Mr Dowden, why not make it a criminal offence not to disclose on any media platform on which you operate your proper name and accurate contact details? Increasing the certainty of being caught and convicted is the only way we will ever get control of this situation.

Because remember, it has worked before. Last autumn, I celebrated 50 years at Stamford Bridge, save for a few years in the late Seventies when the National Front drove me into the arms of Fulham. At that time, racism abounded.

But clubs, the police and others worked together to eradicate it. That cooperation and the fact that with more than 30 per cent of professional footballers now ethnic minority, racial abuse in the ground has become not just a criminal activity, in a law toughened up by my Football Task Force under Tony Blair, but a futile one.

Now the problem has gone online and with a vengeance. But with determination, online abuse can be tackled and defeated as stadium abuse has mainly been. But from where will that determined and united action, as against fine words, really come? Sadly, I am not holding my breath.