"Abuse is wrong. Through social media and on the street - it's wrong."
Liverpool assistant manager Pepijn Lijnders did not mess around when asked about the online abuse football players receive late last month.
And he is absolutely right.
Abuse in any way shape or form has no place in our society but that doesn't stop people levelling all kinds of derogatory insults at others.
Football players in this instance are absolutely no exception.
There are swathes of people purporting to be fans of different clubs across social media who regularly berate rival players and clubs for everything and anything they do.
It seems, at times, that no player can escape it.
Take, for example, a recent study carried out by ESPN and compare.bet.
They carried out research on Twitter from August 6 to September 15, in order to find out which Premier League players were mentioned the most times in negative tweets from others.
Top of the list was Marcus Rashford with 28.5% off all tweets mentioning the Manchester United striker during this time being marked as negative.
Rashford, a player who is going above and beyond to help feed school children in need across the nation.
Second is former Liverpool winger and Manchester City star Raheem Sterling, a player who has been helping to lead the fight against racism and a player that ESPN found that 24.7% of all tweets about were negative.
Elsewhere on the list is the Reds' world-class defender Virgil van Dijk in eighth, as a player who regularly does so much for charity, never speaks out of turn and is always completely respectful but one that 16% of all tweets mentioned negatively.
Other players in the top 10 include Gabriel Jesus, Harry Kane, Dele Alli, Mesut Ozil, David Luiz, Thiago Silva and David de Gea.
Now, this isn't to say that footballers are beyond criticism or that football players receive abuse and that nobody is entitled to an opinion because the way in which the game works relies on fans and those same fans deserve to have a voice in supporting their team and the game.
And it's not to say one set of fans is worse than another.
It's more to highlight the daily abuse volleyed at certain sections of the footballing world, mostly by nameless accounts, that is totally unnecessary and unwarranted while showing exactly who takes the full force of it too.
The long and short of it, is that abuse must stop.
However, with AI governing juggernaut platforms with all space commanded by the giant social media organisations - it seems to be getting better and not worse and it is therefore up to us to start changing behaviours online and not giving the so-called 'trolls' any sort of level from which to spout their vitriol.
