Online attacks: what comments do to athletes and how to protect yourself

It is 11.40 p.m. A hotel room; the match ended three hours ago and the team went to bed after dinner. He is lying on the bed with the light off, lit only by the screen. His thumb scrolls down. Among the congratulations, the hearts and the little flags, a sentence appears: “You’re not worth the shirt. Go home and don’t come back.” Below it are two more that are worse. One mentions his mother.

He reads it once. Then again. Then he opens the sender’s profile to see who it is. The profile has no picture and four followers. At two in the morning he is still reading — by now the comments under an article on a news portal, where people who have never seen him in person are discussing him.

This scene is rarely talked about in sport, although almost everyone who has ever performed in front of an audience knows it. This post is about what online attacks do to athletes, why they hit so hard and what you can do so that you are not carrying all of it alone. I write from the perspective of psychotherapy — not as a sport psychologist — so I am less interested in your next match than in how you will sleep tonight.

Why one comment outweighs a hundred kind ones

If you have ever read a hundred kind messages and remembered only the one nasty one, there is nothing wrong with you. Psychologists call this the negativity bias. In 2001 Roy Baumeister and his colleagues reviewed a large body of research and summed up the finding in the title of their paper: bad is stronger than good. Criticism, threat or rejection leave a deeper and more lasting trace in us than praise of the same intensity. From the point of view of survival this makes sense — overlooking danger used to cost more than overlooking kindness.

Online attacks are not a rarity that befalls only a handful of people. A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center in the United States found that 41 per cent of American adults had personally experienced online harassment, and a quarter had experienced more severe forms such as threats, stalking or sustained harassment. That figure is for the general population, not for athletes. An athlete, however, has a public profile, a result that is measurable and visible to everyone, and mistakes that are discussed in clips replayed again and again. The exposure is therefore considerably greater.

So when you read a nasty comment after a match, what is reacting is not your “weakness” but an old and very efficient system for detecting danger. That system does not distinguish between someone threatening you in the street and an anonymous profile with four followers. To the body, both are an attack.

What is different for athletes

Anyone in the public eye is a target for comments. But for athletes several things come together in a particular way.

• The attacks arrive at the most vulnerable moment. Straight after a defeat, when you are tired, disappointed and still full of adrenaline. That is when your defences are at their lowest.
• The result gets mixed up with the person. “You played badly” quickly becomes “you are bad”. Anyone who has built their sense of worth through sport since childhood finds it hard to tell the two apart.
• Not all the attackers are disappointed fans. Reports from organisations that monitor online abuse in sport point out that some of the worst messages are linked to betting — they are written by people who lost money because of your match.
• Women athletes receive different attacks. Research by Emma Kavanagh and colleagues showed that attacks on sportswomen are often sexualised and aimed at the body rather than the game. Attacks on the basis of skin colour, origin or religion are also common.
• Withdrawing is not always possible. A profile is often part of a sponsorship contract or an agreement with the club. Someone who would most like to disappear has to post every day.

I have written about how the public, the media and sponsors put pressure on athletes in “Media, sponsors, expectations: the pressures athletes don’t talk about”. Here I focus on one very personal part of that pressure: the part that lands in your pocket.

Reading at night: a cycle that runs by itself

The most harmful part of online attacks is often not the comment itself but what happens afterwards. After a match the body stays aroused for a long time. You cannot sleep, so you pick up your phone. You read something nasty. Your body reacts again — your heart speeds up, your stomach tightens. And then, instead of putting the phone down, you keep looking. What else are they writing? Does anyone else think the same? Is anyone standing up for me?

This searching is called rumination — spinning thoughts that give you the sense of solving something while in fact only prolonging the distress. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and her colleagues showed that rumination does not lead to solutions; it deepens a low mood and makes it last longer. If you want to know why the thoughts start spinning just when you should be falling asleep, read Overthinking at bedtime: why the mind starts the film just when it should be switching off.

Sleep comes into this as well. The expert consensus on sleep in athletes published in 2021 by Neil Walsh and colleagues points out that athletes are particularly prone to poor sleep after evening matches and while travelling, and that poor sleep affects mood, judgement and recovery. Reading comments at night is therefore not only an emotional strain but a physical one too. The cycle closes: a bad night, worse training, greater vulnerability to the next comment.

When a comment hits an old wound

Some athletes read nasty comments, laugh and move on. Others carry them for weeks. The difference is not about who is “tougher”. Often it is about whether the comment hits something that was already vulnerable.

If a child heard at home that they were worth as much as their grades or their matches, the adult athlete will hear “you’re not worth the shirt” with a different weight. They will be reacting not only to a stranger with four followers but also to a voice they have known for ever. In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we often see that our inner voices were once outer ones — I wrote about this in Your inner voices were once outer ones.

An online attack therefore often awakens shame — the sense that it is not only what you did that is wrong, but you yourself. Shame is an emotion that drives us into hiding: nobody must know it got to me. And it is precisely this hiding that gives the attack its power. You can read more about how shame works in Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me”, and about processing failure in sport in Defeat, mistakes and shame: how athletes process failure.

“Just don’t read it” is not enough

The most common advice an athlete gets is simple: don’t read it. The advice is good, but on its own it doesn’t work. When something hurts, curiosity is stronger than resolutions. On top of that, the feeling that you should “just” pull yourself together and not look deepens the attack: if I can’t even manage that, what am I?

This is what a conversation between an athlete and his partner at midnight might sound like (a composite, not a real person):

“Reading again?”
“Just this one. I want to see what that journalist said.”
“You said you wouldn’t.”
“I know what I said. But if I don’t read it, someone will ask me about it at training tomorrow and I won’t know.”
“And if you do read it?”
(silence) “Then I won’t sleep.”
“Give me the phone. I’ll tell you in the morning if there was anything you need to know.”

Everything you need is in this short exchange: admitting that you cannot put the phone down on your own, and someone who helps you with it without judging you for it. That is not weakness. It is sharing a load that one person should not have to carry alone.

Layers of protection: don’t carry it all alone

You cannot prevent online attacks. You can, however, decide who intercepts them before they reach you. It helps to imagine protection in layers — from you yourself to the institutions that have the authority to act.

A few concrete steps for each layer:

• You: most platforms let you hide comments containing certain words, limit who can comment and mute profiles. Set these up while you are calm, not in the middle of the night. Decide on hours when you don’t open social media — at least the evening after a match and the morning before one.
• Someone close: choose one person you trust to go through the messages for you. Agree on what they tell you and what they don’t.
• Club, agent, federation: ask whether they have someone who looks after profiles and monitors attacks. Many athletes don’t know they can ask for this.
• Platform and reporting: in Slovenia you can also report hate speech through the online reporting point Spletno oko.

All of this is really a question of boundaries — who may reach you, when and in what form. For many athletes this is a new idea: from childhood they learned to be available to the coach, the team, the fans and the media. I explained why setting boundaries feels selfish even though it isn’t in Setting boundaries: why it feels selfish even though healthy relationships depend on it.

Exercise: a plan for the evening after a match

Do this exercise today, while you are not under pressure — not only after your next match. Take a sheet of paper or the notes app on your phone.

1. Write down your pattern. When do you most often read comments? Where are you, alone or with someone, how long after the match? Just describe it; don’t judge yourself.
2. Set a “closed window”. For example: from the end of the match until breakfast the next day, I don’t open social media. Write down an exact time, not “until I calm down”.
3. Choose your reader. Write down the name of the person who will go through the messages during that time, and talk to them this week. Agree: threats they tell me straight away, everything else the next day or never.
4. Prepare a substitute. What will you do when you feel the urge to look? Call someone, take a shower, do a few minutes of breathing with a longer out-breath, read something that has nothing to do with sport.
5. Leave your phone outside the bedroom. Not as a punishment, but as a way of helping yourself at the hour when willpower is weakest. After the first week, check what has changed — in your sleep, in your mood, in how much you think about the comments.

If one of the steps doesn’t work, that is not a defeat. It is information about where your cycle is strongest — and that is where you need the most help.

When it is no longer just a comment

Some messages are not merely insulting; they cross a line set by the law. When someone threatens you with violence, publishes your home address or details about your children, or persistently stalks you across several profiles or even in person, it is no longer a matter of your resilience. In that case:

• first save the message — a screenshot with the date, username and link visible;
• let the club or federation know, so that they are aware too;
• call the police on 113 (in Slovenia), or 112 in an emergency;
• if the threats are also aimed at your partner or children, the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence is available on 080 11 55 (in Slovenia).

If the attacks lead you to thoughts of not wanting to live, or to a feeling that you cannot bear it any more, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (in Slovenia, every day from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.) or the Samaritans’ confidential line on 116 123 (in Slovenia, every day, 24 hours). A conversation with someone who does not know your name or your results can bring a relief that, at that moment, nobody else can.

It is important to know that reporting is not an overreaction. Many athletes don’t report attacks because they are afraid of looking oversensitive, or because they think it is simply “part of the game”. Threats are not part of any game.

Where this post does not apply

I don’t want anyone to take from this post that every criticism is an attack. It isn’t.

Criticism is not an attack. A journalist’s expert analysis, a coach’s feedback or even a sharp comment from a fan about the game are part of sport. If all of this starts to feel like an attack, it may be worth looking at whether the problem lies elsewhere — in how you experience yourself.

Withdrawing completely is not always the answer. For some athletes their profile is a source of income, and contact with fans means a great deal to them. Closing every account can be a relief, but it can also become a new isolation. What matters more than whether you use social media is whether you are using it or it is using you.

Sometimes the comment is not the cause but the trigger. If for weeks after an attack you feel low, sleep badly, lose your enjoyment of training, withdraw into yourself or think about death, this may mean that depression or an anxiety disorder is developing. Then the right place to go is your GP or club doctor, who can refer you to a psychiatrist. Psychotherapy can be part of the help, but it is not a substitute for a medical assessment.

For performance, a psychotherapist is not the right person. If you want to know how to focus before a match despite the noise online, how to build a routine or how to keep your concentration, the right professional is a sport psychologist. I am not a sport psychologist. I explained who is the right person when in Psychotherapy for athletes: when a coach and a sport psychologist aren’t enough.

What therapy can offer

In therapy we won’t analyse individual comments. What interests me is what happens inside you when you read them — whose voice you hear, when you first heard it, what you needed back then and didn’t get. It often turns out that a stranger’s attack hits exactly where an early crack in your sense of self-worth formed.

The people close to you are an important part of the work as well. A partner who doesn’t know how to help, parents who read the comments more avidly than you do, children who are asked at school whether what people write about their father or mother is true. An online attack is never only yours — it hits the whole family, and sometimes talking with them is exactly what brings the most relief. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

If you want to understand why comparing and measuring ourselves on social media is so exhausting even when nobody is attacking us, read Comparing yourself on social media: what constant measuring does to the brain.

What to remember

• One attack outweighs a hundred kind messages because the brain registers danger more strongly than kindness — that is not weakness, it is biology.
• Reading at night does the most harm: a cycle of rumination and poor sleep that is broken not by willpower but by distance.
• A comment hits deepest where there was already a wound — which is why it deserves a conversation, not just “don’t read it”.
• Protection has several layers: you, someone close, the club, the platform and the police. You don’t have to carry it all alone.
• Save threats and report them on 113; if you have thoughts of death, call 116 123 or 01 520 99 00 (in Slovenia).