Disgruntled sports bettors account for nearly half of all the online abuse aimed at professional tennis players. That’s the big takeaway from a massive data set that was recently released by the International Tennis Federation, Women’s Tennis Association, the All England Lawn Tennis Club and United States Tennis Association. Tennis’ governing bodies collected the data from Threat Matrix, a monitoring service that searches threatening posts and messages that are posted worldwide.
Threat Matrix based their findings on a collection of more than 12,000 online posts that were collected between January and October, 2024. The good news from the report (if you could call it that) was that the comments in question were not isolated to any one region or group. Threat Matrix found threatening posts in 39 different languages. Fifteen of the posts in question were deemed so serious that they were reported to law enforcement agencies.
Though gambling-related abuse accounted for a large amount of online abuse faced by tennis players, sexist and sexually inappropriate remarks made up the largest category of posts flagged by Threat Matrix.
As part of its service to tennis’ governing bodies, Threat Matrix blocks these types of comments from ever actually reaching the players. In that regard, the service has protected more than 8,000 players from toxic and threatening online abuse.
Jonathan Hirshler, CEO of Signify Group, the company behind Threat Matrix commented lauded tennis authorities for taking online abuse seriously saying, “The tennis authorities have shown great leadership to drive such a comprehensive, season-long approach to protect their players and the wider tennis family from online abuse and threat. We are extremely pleased to have helped close down a considerable number of prolific abusive accounts and identified clear drivers for abuse, including a large number of angry gamblers.”