France’s players received the highest volume of homophobic abuse directed at any national team during the 2026 men’s FIFA World Cup, according to a new report documenting hundreds of thousands of abusive social-media messages sent during the tournament.
France’s national football team was subjected to more homophobic abuse online than any other country during the 2026 men’s World Cup, new FIFA data shows.
The findings come from FIFA’s Social Media Protection Service, which monitored social-media activity surrounding players, coaches, officials and participating teams throughout the tournament in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Across the monitoring period, the system analysed more than 17.1 million posts and comments.
Artificial-intelligence systems flagged 477,217 messages for human review, with analysts ultimately verifying 240,676 as abusive. Those messages targeted 812 of the 1,606 individuals being monitored.
France’s players were the most heavily abused team across the platforms studied, receiving more than 18,000 abusive instances.
FIFA found racism accounted for around one-third of the abuse aimed at the French team, alongside a similarly large volume of more general insults.
The report adds that France was also the national side receiving the highest volume of homophobic abuse.
What did the homophobic abuse look like?
FIFA defines the category as including homophobic slurs and other language weaponising sexuality to insult or taunt players.
Across the full dataset, homophobia represented 4% of all detected abuse.
However, FIFA also publishes a second breakdown excluding “general abuse” — its category for insulting or abusive language that does not target a protected characteristic.
Once that category is removed, homophobia accounts for 7% of the remaining abuse, while racism accounts for 20%.
That distinction matters.
It means the often-reported figure that 7% of World Cup abuse was homophobic does not refer to all abusive messages FIFA verified. It refers specifically to the dataset after general insults are taken out.
The report nevertheless describes homophobic and sexual abuse as two of the more prominent discriminatory categories identified during the tournament.
One player received more than 10,000 abusive messages
The scale of abuse was even more concentrated for some individuals.
FIFA says the tournament’s most targeted player received more than 10,000 instances of abuse.
The player is not named in the report.
Around 40% of the abuse aimed at them was racist, while FIFA says they were also the individual most targeted by homophobia, sexism and transphobia.
The volume of abuse rose sharply after racist comments made by a public figure about the player circulated widely online.
The decision not to identify the player means the report does not invite speculation about their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Homophobic and transphobic abuse is frequently used against people regardless of whether they are actually LGBTQ+.
France was not the most targeted team overall
There is another important distinction in FIFA’s data.
When abuse directed at national-team accounts is analysed separately, Argentina was the most targeted national team, with much of the abuse involving general insults, corruption allegations and xenophobia.
England was second.
But when abuse aimed specifically at individual players is grouped by their national side, France’s players collectively received the highest volume, followed by England.
The French and English teams were particularly exposed to racist and xenophobic attacks concerning the nationality, heritage and identity of Black and dual-heritage players.
More than half of monitored people were targeted
FIFA monitored 1,248 players, 188 managers and coaching staff, and 170 match officials, alongside 48 team accounts.
More than half of the individuals monitored received at least one message categorised as abusive.
Across the entire dataset, general insults remained the largest category at 43%, followed by racism at 12%, corruption allegations at 9%, violence at 8%, xenophobia at 7% and homophobia at 4%.
The scale of violent abuse was also notable.
FIFA says threats and wishes of harm represented a significant share of the most serious cases referred for further investigation.
How FIFA monitors abuse
FIFA’s Social Media Protection Service uses technology developed with specialist analysts to monitor public-facing accounts across X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
Its automated system identifies potentially abusive material before human analysts assess whether it meets FIFA’s criteria.
The service can also automatically hide abusive comments from participating accounts that have opted into its moderation system, report offending material to social-media companies and preserve evidence where messages may meet thresholds for criminal investigation.
During the World Cup, FIFA says the wider moderation system reviewed 60.7 million comments on official FIFA and participating-team channels.
Around 9.2 million comments — 15% — were hidden before appearing publicly because systems identified spam, fraud, toxicity or other harmful material.
Some cases were referred to law enforcement
The monitoring went beyond simply hiding comments.
FIFA says 2,905 accounts met its threshold for potential investigation.
Of those, 786 were referred to law enforcement for review, while 232 accounts were prioritised because their content was assessed as potentially presenting a serious security threat.
The full report says investigators completed 87 detailed investigations and generated 30 actionable identifications that were shared with FIFA security teams and relevant authorities.
For players, that means some of the most serious threats are increasingly being treated as potential real-world safety issues rather than merely unpleasant online commentary.
Why comparisons with Qatar need caution
The level of abuse detected during the 2026 tournament was substantially higher than at the 2022 men’s World Cup in Qatar.
But FIFA itself cautions that improvements in its technology make direct comparisons complicated.
The number of messages subjected to automated moderation increased from 13.7 million in 2022 to 60.7 million in 2026, while the number sent for human review rose much less dramatically, from 434,000 to 477,000.
In other words, the increase reflects both genuine abusive activity and a system that is now capable of scanning and intercepting far more material.
That does not diminish the scale of what was found.
It simply means the numbers should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that supporters became a specific number of times more abusive between the two tournaments.
Homophobia remains part of football’s abuse problem
The findings underline something LGBTQ+ football supporters have long recognised: homophobic language remains embedded in parts of fan culture, even when the people being targeted are not themselves openly queer.
Using sexuality as an insult reinforces the idea that being gay, bisexual or otherwise LGBTQ+ is something shameful.
And when those messages appear alongside racism, xenophobia, sexism and threats of violence, the impact extends far beyond whoever happens to be wearing a national-team shirt.
FIFA says the service is designed not only to protect players and officials but also to prevent followers from being repeatedly exposed to discriminatory abuse.
At the 2026 World Cup, the scale of that task was enormous.
And for France’s players in particular, homophobia was a measurable part of the abuse they were expected to navigate simply for taking the field.
