The UK Football Policing Unit has received nearly 600 referrals of online abuse towards England players since the start of Euro 2024. The figures, revealed by Channel 4 News, showed spikes in abusive posts after England’s group games, with the majority of posts containing racist content or language. The UKFPU has said 26 cases are under investigation. “It’s roughly around 85% of most of the grossly offensive posts that we see are racism, followed by homophobia,” said superintendent Mike Ankers, the UKFPU investigations lead. “We still get vile use of the N-word. They will be quite prominent. We’ll also get things like monkey emoji, that in itself will be grossly offensive. So we would be taking action. “What we did see in 2022, which followed on from the 2021 missed penalties of the three black players [at the European Championship final] was a legislation change, which meant that online hate abuse became a section one offence which enables us to apply for a banning order. “A banning order enables us to remove probably the one thing that they enjoy, which is football, for up to 10 years, which means that they can’t travel, they can’t go and watch games.” England’s Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho were the target of racist abuse online after missing in the penalty shootout against Italy three years ago and 11 people were arrested. The UKFPU received 102 referrals of online abuse after England’s Euro 2024 opener against Serbia, with 12 of those cases being investigated. After the second game against Denmark, 292 social media posts were referred, with three meeting the threshold for police investigation. The final group game against Slovenia saw 177 posts referred with 11 cases being investigated. The UKFPU said on Friday that six England fans were issued with football banning orders related to disorder in Gelsenkirchen before the Serbia game on 16 June.