FanShield
A moderation and victim-support service for sports clubs and leagues that watches every social channel for abuse targeting players, auto-flags the worst incidents to platforms, and assembles police-ready evidence packs.
Digital and safeguarding teams at professional and semi-professional sports clubs, plus league-level integrity units
- Real-time monitoring of player mentions, hashtags, and reply threads across X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube
- Abuse severity scoring with auto-report routing to the relevant platform's hate-speech reporting flow
- One-click evidence pack export (screenshots, timestamps, account metadata) formatted for UK police hate-crime reporting
- Player welfare case management so safeguarding officers can track support offered after each incident
Repeat incidents like the Wigan-St Helens Junior Nsemba abuse show sports social channels still lack systematic protection; clubs are being told to 'report to police' with no tooling.
BBC investigation found 2,000+ extremely abusive posts directed at Premier League/WSL players/managers in a single weekend, and FIFA's SMPS processed 5.9M posts (179,517 flagged, 20,587 reported) at one tournament — clear, large-volume and recurring harm.Football abuse: Premier League and WSL stars targeted by death threats - BBC ↗FIFA enhances its Social Media Protection Service as it steps up action against online abuse ↗
FIFA already runs a free SMPS for its tournaments and Member Associations year-round, occupying the top of the market; semi-pro clubs, individual franchises, and non-FIFA leagues (rugby, cricket, women's leagues outside FIFA scope) are less covered, but established social-listening players (Talkwalker) sit adjacent — gap exists but is narrower than the idea suggests.FIFA Social Media Protection Service ↗Pricing | Talkwalker Social Listening and Media Monitoring ↗
FIFA provides its service gratis to MAs, undercutting paid alternatives and conditioning the market to expect free protection; clubs do have digital/safeguarding budgets, but willingness-to-pay evidence is thin and pricing benchmarks (Talkwalker enterprise-tier) signal a hard sell down-market to semi-pro clubs.FIFA steps up action against online abuse ↗Pricing | Talkwalker Social Listening and Media Monitoring ↗
Problem is structural and worsening with the professionalisation of women's sport and rising social-media volume; safeguarding regulation (UK, EU) is tightening duty-of-care expectations on clubs, anchoring long-term demand.Sports Organisations' Responses to Social Media Abuse Against Athletes ↗Safeguarding in Sport: Online Abuse of Athletes (PDF) ↗
Technically buildable on existing platform APIs (X, Meta, TikTok abuse-report endpoints) plus off-the-shelf moderation/NLP, but the value-add of 'police-ready evidence packs' requires legal-domain expertise, chain-of-custody workflows and integrations with each platform's reporting API — non-trivial and ongoing to maintain.PDF Social Media Protection Service (FIFA threat matrix) ↗Help Center - report abuse on Instagram ↗