FA to fund police over online abuse of England players

The Football Association (FA) will provide funding to the police to aid in the prosecution of individuals who abuse England’s players on social media, the governing body’s CEO Mark Bullingham said ahead of Euro 2024.

Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho were targets of racist online abuse after they missed spot-kicks in a 3-2 shootout loss to Italy in the final of the previous edition of the tournament.

In 2022, a British teenager was sentenced to six weeks in prison for racially abusing Rashford after the final, while a man who live-streamed himself racially abusing the trio on Facebook was jailed for 10 weeks.

“Now we are doing things differently,” Bullingham told the media. “In the past what we did was put together all the data, effectively an evidence pack, to give to the police to prosecute. But this time we have gone a stage further where we are actually funding a unit within the British police that will then prosecute.

“What we don’t want to do is create a pack that we then give to the police for them to prosecute but they don’t have the resource to actually take that forward. So we are actually paying for the prosecution to then happen and funding the police to make sure if there are instances of some examples we have seen before, that they get prosecuted.”

Bullingham said the funding would cost the FA around £25,000 but added that the figure could change depending on the number of prosecutions.

England kick off their Group C campaign against Serbia on Sunday, followed by matches against Denmark on June 20 and Slovenia on June 25.

Reuters