The New Baseline for Digital Close Protection: Why Online Abuse Is a Performance Issue, Not Just a PR Problem

We love watching sport, and much of that comes from the people playing it. They are human enough to remind us of ourselves and impressive enough to make us want to be a bit more like them, and we follow them through the mistakes, the bad days and the defeats as much as the wins.   

Yet a survey by the FIA and United Against Online Abuse found that 90% of the federations surveyed believe athletes may leave their sport as a result of online abuse. That is hard to ignore when sport depends on people being willing to put themselves through that scrutiny. If athletes are pushed towards switching off their feelings just to cope with the attention, we end up with something quite different from the sport we care about. An athlete with all the feeling removed is a robot, and very few people form an attachment to one.   

We have normalised the wrong thing

Online abuse has become so familiar that it is easy to treat it as part of the job. A bad result, a missed chance or a controversial decision is followed by comments that everyone expects and nobody really questions. A report commissioned by the International Olympic Committee found that as many as a third of posts directed at athletes contained negative content, suggesting this has become part of the everyday environment around sport rather than something that only appears during a major controversy.   

But we would not accept that logic elsewhere. If people regularly waited outside a training ground to shout personal abuse at a player, nobody would tell the player to ignore it on the way in. The organisation would look at who had access, how the environment was being protected and what could be done to stop it. The fact that the same thing can now happen through a screen should not make that responsibility disappear. This is exactly why implementing robust Digital Close Protection is no longer an optional security measure, but a fundamental duty of care.   

Why Digital Close Protection should happen before exposure

That is where the idea of a digital perimeter becomes useful. An athlete's phone is where their team messages them, where sponsors and the media get in touch, where family and friends reach them and where much of their public profile lives. It is as much a part of their working environment as the dressing room, but unlike the dressing room, it has no door and no accreditation. Anyone with an account can send something into it, and the first abusive reply can arrive while the player is still walking off the pitch.   

For too long, online safety has been measured by what happens after harmful content appears, whether an account was reported, a post removed, or an offender blocked. Those are useful measures, but they all begin after the athlete has potentially been exposed. A more useful measure is whether the athlete ever had to see it.   

That means identifying harmful content early, blocking repeat accounts, and recognising when a series of comments becomes something more serious, so the athlete isn't expected to patrol their own perimeter.   

That is the thinking behind Elite by Fleko's Digital Close Protection, which works in the background to identify and remove abusive content, keeping harmful material away from the athlete. At the same time, people who understand the nature and pace of online threats handle the issue. Opinion, debate and scrutiny are part of what makes sport interesting, and the aim is to separate legitimate criticism from targeted abuse, which has no place in it.   

A new baseline for sport

This matters for performance as well. Elite sport already puts enormous thought into protecting concentration, sleep, recovery and physical wellbeing. The digital environment around an athlete deserves the same consideration, particularly when abuse tends to arrive after a mistake, during a major fixture or when an athlete's name is suddenly trending.   

If we want to keep watching the people we have become invested in, we need to make sure they can keep playing without being asked to become something they are not.