The cycle is predictable. A young man kicks a ball, scores a goal, or misses a tackle. Within seconds, his phone vibrates with the digitized bile of someone hiding behind a cartoon avatar and a string of numbers. This time, the names in the crosshairs were Tolu Arokodare and Romaine Mundle. Another "appalling weekend," according to the headlines. Another 48 hours where the business of sports collided with the failure of big tech, and, as usual, the tech won.

It’s a routine we’ve perfected. The clubs issue a statement—bold font, heavy on the "zero tolerance" rhetoric. The league's social media accounts post a black square or a hashtag. And the platforms? They point to their community guidelines, those nebulous scrolls of legalese that somehow never seem to catch the most obvious filth.

Arokodare, playing for Genk, found himself the target of racist abuse after a match in the Belgian Pro League. Mundle, a rising light at Sunderland, faced the same digital firing squad in the UK. The specifics of the matches don't really matter. In the eyes of the algorithm, these players aren't humans; they’re high-performing engagement nodes. When they do something that triggers a reaction—positive or negative—the machinery hums. The hate isn't a glitch. It’s a byproduct of a system designed to keep us scrolling at any cost.

Let’s talk about the friction. Moderation isn't a technical problem anymore; it’s a budget line item. For a company like Meta or X, building a filter that flags specific racial slurs and monkey emojis is a weekend project for a junior dev. But doing that at scale requires humans. It requires local context. It requires a "safety" team that hasn't been gutted to appease a billionaire’s mid-life crisis or a shareholder’s thirst for efficiency. The trade-off is simple: we can have a clean platform, or we can have a high-margin platform. Silicon Valley chose the margins a long time ago.

When Mundle or Arokodare get targeted, the platform’s first instinct isn't to protect the victim. It’s to automate the defense. You get a "report" button that feels like a crosswalk signal in a city where the wires aren't connected. You click it. You wait. Three days later, you get an automated message saying the content—which was clearly, violently racist—didn't "violate our standards."

It’s a gaslighting masterclass.

We’re told that these companies are working on "AI-driven solutions" to combat toxicity. It’s a nice fairy tale. In reality, the AI is much better at serving you an ad for a blender you mentioned once in a dream than it is at identifying a slur typed in a Belgian dialect or a clever bit of coded hate. The "appalling weekend" is just a data spike on a dashboard in Menlo Park. A few thousand extra reports, a few million extra impressions. From a distance, it looks like growth.

The clubs are tired. The fans are tired. But the players are the ones paying the tax. Arokodare shouldn't have to navigate a minefield of bigotry because he dared to be good at his job. Mundle shouldn't have to log off the internet to find peace. Yet, the burden of "safety" is always placed on the victim. Check your settings. Filter your keywords. Block the accounts. It’s the digital equivalent of telling someone to wear a bulletproof vest because the city refuses to stop selling ammunition to the local lunatics.

We keep waiting for a "turning point." We think if the abuse gets loud enough, or if enough stars boycott the apps, something will shift. It won't. Not as long as the cost of the PR cleanup is cheaper than the cost of actual moderation. The current system is perfectly calibrated to produce exactly what we saw this weekend: maximum outrage, minimal accountability, and a steady stream of traffic.

The platforms will tell you they’re "saddened" by the abuse. They’ll trot out a spokesperson to talk about their commitment to a "safe community." They might even ban a few burner accounts that will be replaced by dinner time. But they won’t change the fundamental architecture of the feed, because the feed thrives on friction. And nothing creates friction quite like hate.

How many more "appalling weekends" are priced into the stock?