Women’s Football Faces a Wave of Online Abuse

As women’s football continues to grow its fanbase, players at both amateur and professional levels are receiving more attention online. But alongside this rise in visibility has come a sharp increase in abuse, with the growth of women’s sport mirrored by a growing backlash against it. The recent rise of the ‘manosphere’ has also contributed to a backslide in attitudes towards gender roles, particularly among young men whose views are increasingly shaped by online discourse.

In February 2025, radio presenter Marty Sheargold delivered a misogyny-radio rant in which he compared Australia’s Matildas to “year 10 girls” and said he would rather “hammer a nail through the head of [his] penis” than watch the national women’s football team. His comments were widely criticised across Australian media and the public square.

These attitudes threaten to undermine the women’s game at a time of historic growth. Women’s football has expanded significantly in the 21st century, especially in Australia, where the Matildas’ 2023 World Cup run captivated the nation and helped spark “Matildas Fever”. the most watched broadcasts in Australian history, creating a sense that women’s sport could overcome many of the hurdles facing it. Yet the attitudes behind Sheargold’s comments continue to appear online, where social media users remain fixated on any on-field mistake made by women.

The author of this briefing plays football at an amateur level and notes that errors and misplays are common in the men’s game. Yet clips of men making these mistakes rarely appear in the author’s Instagram feed and, when they do go viral, neither the framing nor the comments typically link the error to the player’s gender.

By contrast, mistakes by female players are routinely circulated and scrutinised across all levels of the women’s game, from Sunday league to international football. This reflects what Kilvington calls a “digitalized backlash against, and gatekeeping of, women’s growing presence in football”, creating an online space where “football fandom and expertise continue to be policed by men, in which beliefs about women’s inferiority fuel online ridicule and abuse.”

What did I see?

As part of this briefing, I located and analysed types of misogynistic abuse in various formats on Instagram, including: 

1. Mistake Content: Posts of women playing football, where mistakes are the key focus 

This kind of content denigrates the women’s game by unfairly drawing attention to them (often resulting in a slew of misogynistic commentary).

2. Traditionally Misogynistic Comments: Posts of regular clips of women’s football, drawing misogynistic commentary regardless of the nature of the clip.

It is worth noting that on many occasions, the posts do not always depict ‘lowlights’. They are often simply clips showcasing mundane aspects of the women’s game. And yet, the comments often reflect a deeply entrenched misogynistic discourse, whereby overwhelmingly male commenters seek to undermine the women involved with misogynistic claims. These can range from subtle to overt in their harmfulness; from simple proclamations that the commenter could do better than the players depicted, unfairly harsh critiques of the women in the clips regardless of the quality of the play, to comments telling women to ‘stay in the kitchen’ and other generally abusive, misogynistic rhetoric.

For example, the Official FIFA Women’s World Cup posted a clip of a goal by England Lioness International Footballer Chloe Kelly. Below we feature some of the accompanying comments, the tone of which were generally derisive and sexist in nature. Rather than heaping praise on the goalscorer who demonstrated technical skill and competence to score, derision and ridicule is directed at the goalkeeper of the opposition team.

Continuing to snowball through the misogyny-filled corners of Instagram, the posts became darker and more abusive. A large number of clips are being posted with clear intention to denigrate. Young girls are ridiculed for playing sport in an amateur capacity.

The following screenshot is from an instagram clip of a local league match of teenagers, which inadvertently went viral and attracted a deluge of hateful comments, mostly by men.

The post below shows a clip of a goal where a goalkeeper has a delayed reaction causing a goal, which is then spliced together with 2 influencers ‘shadowboxing’, where 1 punches the other, and the recipient of the punch dodges at least 3 seconds after the original punch is thrown. This framing serves to demean the goalkeeper who is ‘guilty’ of the error of having a slow reaction.

Famous Australian sports star in Nick Kyrgios left a comment on this video. They commented using their public-facing, blue tick verified profile, receiving 12.3k likes for their remark “should get paid [sic.] the same as Hugo lorris [sic]. I see no difference”.

This is a sarcastic comment that insinuates that a call for equal pay is unreasonable due to perceived skill gaps between men and women. Kyrgios is a talented and recognisable tennis player, with influence and reach amongst young men and women in Australia.

If public figures like Kyrgios feel comfortable posting demeaning comments on his public profile without fear of backlash, it is indicative of the state of the public discourse around women’s sport. In particular, it speaks to the normalisation of hateful comments that would happily publicly undermine and degrade people simply enjoying or playing the sport.

The Algorithmic Dimension

There is some existing research in this space that explores the sociological drivers behind this pervasive subculture of misogyny. Fenton et al.’s (2023) research focuses on how fans globally respond to the greater visibility of female sport professionals on social media. Fenton’s study highlights that social media exacerbates toxic fan cultures. The research draws on Litchfield’s understanding of how unregulated social media environments cultivate a ‘veil of anonymity’, within which sexist discourses are emboldened. As part of his research, Fenton undertook ‘netnography’, his team embedding themselves for 7 months within TikTok football subcultures to collect and analyse qualitative data. 

4 key themes emerged:

1. Sexism: the place of women in football;
2. Misogyny and hatred of women;
3. Sexualisation of women; 
4. Demand for a male-only space.

Watching these clips left me with questions surrounding the algorithmic drivers behind some of the posts. They suggest the presence of a self-reinforcing feedback loop, whereby clips of women making mistakes garner attention and engagement, resulting in a further demand for some of these posts online by accounts that want to cultivate that engagement. From my experience researching this briefing, footage of women scoring goals did not garner nearly as much engagement as women making mistakes while playing football. 

Like viruses, disinformation and misinformation, sensationalist clips of mistakes travel fast, and social media is now being instrumentalised to shape perceptions of the women’s game. One goal after Arsenal W vs Olympique Lyonnais Feminin went viral as a result of Christian Endler’s mistake, and clips were subsequently reposted by ESPN UK on X, representing the sportscaster’s sole coverage for the whole weekend.  One Sport’s digital creator – Naylinsfootyjourney – points out that she is aware that mistakes happen across every game of football. The problem is the “same mistakes are overrepresented when it’s women, and that shapes the entire narrative”. 

In her view, social media’s selective representation of mistake content threatens to “distort perception of the level of the game, undermine players by framing them through mistakes”, as a consequence inviting toxic commentary and slowing audience growth. 

Online harm, Real-World consequence

The virality of these clips, and the mutually reinforcing nature of algorithmic engagement patterns, demonstrates how denigration of women in sport can be amplified online, with real world implications. Reporting statistics for 2024/25 from Kick It Out, the campaign set up to combat discrimination in football, showed incidents of sexism and misogyny rising by 67%, increasing from 115 to 192 reports. Much of this increase was attributed to online abuse, with sexist content specifically rising by 72%. This increase followed the launch of the organisation’s ‘Kick Sexism Out’ campaign amid calls for greater consistency in how sexist abuse is monitored and recorded across football.

As noted above, opaque algorithmic drivers result in some of these videos having large amounts of traffic. In the example below, a parent-operated account showing her 10-year-old daughter’s football highlights has 46k followers at the time of this article’s writing: and yet, the post that appeared in the ‘front page’ attracted 18.5 million views, and thousands of abusive comments from adult men.

A 2024 Article ‘Key Challenges Facing Women and Girls in Australian Sport‘ details the significant barriers to full participation and recognition for women and girls in Australia. 

Amidst a plethora of structural challenges, two of note are:

1. the high dropout rates among girls in their teenage years, as well as 
2. the lack of a supportive environment, whereby women’s sports suffer from inadequate funding, limited coverage, and unfavorable perceptions relative to the men’s game. 

Looking at the commentary alongside any of the above posts would conceivably only discourage young women who engage with this harmful content from becoming or remaining active in women’s sports, with potential second-order effects impacting quality, perceptions and funding opportunities relative to the men’s equivalent codes. Sometimes, like with Marty Sheargold, defenders of this behaviour instrumentalise humour as a defensive catch-all. To them, these posts may seem harmless and lighthearted, but when women’s sport faces ongoing issues regarding viewership, funding, and as a result, payment for professionals, these posts actively contribute to an environment that threatens the ongoing success of the women’s sport as a whole, and attention should be drawn to the issue before it impacts the longevity/security of those involved in the women’s game.

Conclusion 

All people, regardless of gender, deserve to engage with the sport they love in a way that feels safe. If our online sphere is anything to go by, we have a long way to go if we want to strive towards equality in this respect. 

A positive note to end on; when looking through content, I noticed the occasional appreciation posts underscoring some of the unappreciated aspects of the women’s game. 

In a post by Jvillanueavabebe captioned ‘these women are tougher than some men in soccer’, the user records himself reacting to a well-crafted overhead goal at the amateur level: 

• “Forget that they scored a goal in the most beautifulist fashion ever dawg… the fact that they were pulling, kicking each other..none of them went down and asked the ref for a red card like these fking men do in the sport. I think women in soccer is more interesting than men in soccer. I said what I said.”

The comments outside of the cesspool of manosphere inspired hatred largely affirm this supportive sentiment. While there will continue to be huge challenges, nothing can stop the growing popularity of the women’s game. Framed this way, the hateful rhetoric explored above serves as evidence of this alone; one day, hopefully as archaic examples of futile pushback against the inevitable rise of women’s football.

Note: OHPI’s staff debated vigorously over whether the word “football” or “soccer” should be used throughout this briefing. After much deliberation, “football” was agreed upon. We sincerely apologise for the inevitable hurt and confusion that this decision will have caused.

Media contact:
Online Hate Prevention Institute
Email: joshua@ohpi.org.au
Website: www.ohpi.org.au

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