England stars Jadon Sancho, Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Raheem Sterling were sent nearly 2,000 “potentially abusive” tweets.
That is the shock figure released by the Professional Footballers’ Association after an investigation into social media abuse during the Euros.
And the report also reveals that 167 posts were considered to be “high risk” and while some of the tweets were deleted it says the accounts have not been permanently suspended by Twitter.
The data was analysed by science company Signify who also produced a ground breaking report into abuse sent to 44 players during Project Restart.
They extended their report for the 2020/21 season which included the Euros and it says over 850,000 tweets were analysed across the length of the tournament.
The PFA report said: “Our preliminary analysis suggests the volume of abuse flagged around the EURO 2020 Final, aimed mainly at Jadon Sancho, Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Raheem Sterling, was higher than the rest of the tournament combined.
“The PFA and Signify are currently analysing data from the 2020/2021 season. In August, we will publish findings alongside potential solutions and recommendations.”
Twitter did tell Mirror Sport that it found the racist abuse “abhorrent” and insisted that more than 1,000 tweets had been removed and accounts had been permanently suspended.
A Twitter spokesman said: “The abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter.
“In the past 24 hours, through a combination of machine learning based automation and human review, we have swiftly removed over 1000 Tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules - the vast majority of which we detected ourselves proactively using technology.
“We will continue to take action when we identify any Tweets or accounts that violate our policies.”
The PFA said Signify’s technology Threat Matrix has analysed over 10 million posts in the full season breakdown and can refer cases to the police and Crown Prosecution Service if they are deemed to be hate crimes.
