In the past 12 months, the online abuse of athletes has been highlighted like never before. Several high profile sports stars have called on sites to do more in their efforts to stop the abuse.
To showcase what elite athletes now have to live with, Pickswise analysed every tweet sent to professionals in the sports of Football, Basketball, Soccer, Tennis, Golf and Ice Hockey over the last year.
LA Lakers star LeBron James was by far the most abused athlete on Twitter – James had 279% more abusive messages than Marcus Rashford who was second on the list. The Akron native also received the most LGBT-phobic tweets.
Tom Brady won yet another Super Bowl this year but the 43-year-old still receives a lot of abuse on social media. The Bucs quarterback received the third highest amount of online abuse with 28,151 messages.
Most Abused Athletes
| Name | Sport | Count of Abusive Messages |
| LeBron James | Basketball | 122,568 |
| Marcus Rashford | Soccer | 32,328 |
| Tom Brady | American Football | 28,151 |
| Kevin Durant | Basketball | 24,370 |
| Bubba Wallace | NASCAR | 21,750 |
| Damian Lillard | Basketball | 20,904 |
| Trevor Bauer | Baseball | 14,083 |
| Cristiano Ronaldo | Soccer | 11,757 |
| Stephen Curry | Basketball | 11,203 |
| Mesut Ozil | Soccer | 11,192 |
| JuJu Smith-Schuster | American Football | 10,164 |
| Dez Bryant | American Football | 10,163 |
| Stan Collymore | Soccer | 9,659 |
| Deshaun Watson | American Football | 9,293 |
| James Harden | Basketball | 9,220 |
| Michael Thomas | American Football | 8,051 |
| Kyrie Irving | Basketball | 7,860 |
| Lamar Jackson | American Football | 7,856 |
| Odell Beckham Jr | American Football | 7,451 |
| Paul Pogba | Soccer | 7,349 |
Steelers WR JuJu Smith Schuster was mocked all season long for his TikTok antics and that carried over to Twitter where Smith-Schuster received over 10,000 abusive messages. JuJu wasn’t the only WR on the list either.
Dez Bryant, Michael Thomas and Odell Beckham Jr all received thousands of abusive tweets over the past 12 months.
Driver Bubba Wallace has been praised for breaking down racial barriers in NASCAR and using his position for activism. Unfortunately Wallace has also been the target of social media trolls – receiving over 21,000 abusive messages.
David Frazier, the co-founder of the Final Whistle™ App Ltd said: “Hate crime in all society is unacceptable and hate crime both on social media and at live grassroots to professional sporting events has a wider impact on society.
“Final Whistle™ aims with the help of Stop Hate UK to enable the reporting and subsequent victim/witness support and offender prosecution of all types of hate crime in global sport.”
