Real Madrid: Bigotry, toxicity, and fake rumors on social media are hurting football

Social media enables Real Madrid fans to connect with each other and follow their favorite team more closely than ever, but it comes at a greater cost.

The introduction of social media has opened our eyes to a whole new world of interaction that we never knew was possible. Through that, we have collectively become addicted to using these channels in order to talk to our friends, make travel plans, catch up on the latest news and follow our beloved football teams as we are now updated quicker than ever before on the latest developments. Is that necessarily a good thing, though?

Social media has dramatically helped a lot of teams reach heights that they would probably not have reached if it wasn’t for this exposure while it was also witnessed some teams reach new lows. Certain clubs have decided to use this platform to engage the fans and/or open our eyes to things happening around the world. All in all, I believe that social media has dramatically helped teams evolve and collect data on their fans while staying engaged with them throughout the day. I also believe it really hurts the clubs when you look at it from the fans’ perspective.

As a fan, you have unlimited access to your club throughout the day, and that is without spending a single cent on being a member. All you need is to have Twitter and follow them there while also ensuring that you’re following the right people on the platform in order to stay up-to-date. Once that is finalized, all you have to do is refresh your feed occasionally and see what has been happening.

Fake Rumors

This has opened a world to fans that is quite dangerous for the club. Right now, the average fan is able to know everything happening within the club, can criticize with zero consequences, and they can also spread fake rumors if they have enough of a following. All three things affect the club negatively, because they suddenly find themselves in a storm that they never knew existed and therefore they’ll have to maneuver their way out of it in one way or another when they could have been focusing on other more important matters.

Of course, the bigger clubs suffer from this a lot more than the ones with less following, but I believe that all clubs go through this to a certain extent.

People have been able to build a big enough ‘following’ on their Twitter accounts and are now seen as experts on the transfer matter or what goes on inside the club. People look to them for answers and forget that the club they are supporting will have your answers at some point, and if they don’t, then that’s only because this is how football has always been.

In the summer of 2018, Real Madrid were reportedly after Neymar and Kylian Mbappe while many of the “expert fans” have said that it’s happening very soon and Los Blancos are in talks with them before the club came out and made a clear statement saying that neither one of those two players are coming. This shocked many, as they looked to these various accounts that they have believed this whole time and wondered how they got it wrong. The answer is easy: No one knows what happens at the club unless they are part of it. That’s it.

Throughout the summer transfer window, we were able to stay updated with every single transfer and knew about all of them before they were ever confirmed by anyone that has authority at the clubs. We knew about Luka Jovic, and we were fully prepared to read the announcement from Real Madrid that we sold Keylor Navas and brought in Alphonse Areola as a replacement. We even knew that Eden Hazard was on the Real Madrid shortlist for the past three seasons.

Obviously, it’s great to be updated with your club’s news, but imagine for a second that the only updates you get are confirmed by the club…

This way, you would have been absolutely over the moon with our signings this summer, because time would not have been spent on the “will he/won’t he” of other players such as Donny Van de Beek or Paul Pogba. We wouldn’t have even known who Los Merengues were going after, and therefore we wouldn’t care what is true and what isn’t. All we would know was who our club signed and who left while we can formulate opinions on our own without finding ourselves opening Twitter and sharing something extremely vile and horrible about Zidane for no reason whatsoever.

Bleacher Report recently released a video on Twitter which shows just how much a person has to go through in order to get the correct information. B/R cameras followed the popular Fabrizio Romano around during one of the days of the transfer window, and you can see that even when practically everyone is saying that a transfer is in progress, he still needs to double-check. It’s a chaotic world, but people have decided to use that to their advantage in order to get the following they want.

Bigotry and Bullying

Then, we have the downright vile. We have the people who have realized that social media can essentially consist of a person saying whatever they want from wherever they want without anyone able to stop them. Not only that, no one needs to know who they really are. Social Media has assisted people in creating a completely fake personality, and even though that could be used in various ways, the majority have decided to use it to bring out the ugliest sides of themselves and show everyone who they truly are: Racists.

It is 2019 and somehow we are still seeing a large number of people coming out with absolutely horrendous comments about players simply because of their skin color. Many of these people are actually criticizing players of the club that they support as well! It is incredibly shocking that we are STILL in a world where there are platforms that give racists a chance to speak and share their opinions with the world no matter how cruel it could be.

When it isn’t a racist comment, then it’s one about the looks of a player. We have all seen some of the things said about players at Real Madrid like Gareth Bale, Thibaut Courtois and Lucas Vazquez.

We have also seen our fair share of sexism on social media, perhaps as a response to the fact that FIFA and UEFA have finally given women in the sport a bigger platform, which continues to grow slowly.

Don’t choose hate and ignorance

We can focus on games and cheer our teams on without having to come out with unnecessary criticism simply because we found ways to express our ‘opinion’ from behind the screen in search for retweets and likes. We can criticize the game, the tactics, the play and the players without having to tweet it and go against one another just because we can.

I grew up knowing football as the ‘beautiful game’, and as much as social media has opened some incredible doors for the world of football and sports in general, it has also really hurt it. The idea of having the fans so close to the club sounds great, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s always a good idea.

Social media has really assisted in bringing football up to a new level but the fans are not letting it use this platform for something positive and instead they have chosen to use it for hate and ignorance. Social media itself does not have the power to kill football. It is killing the game we love, and we have to be held account for our behavior as a collective fan base.

Just because you have more access to the beautiful game than ever before, it doesn’t give you the right to ruin it by being racist, sexist, and downright awful.