Abdoulaye Doucoure abuse after Everton and Liverpool clash 'some of the worst' Premier League has seen

The Premier League's director of content protection Tim Cooper says the racist abuse that Everton's Abdoulaye Doucoure was subjected to after Goodison Park's final Merseyside Derby was some of the worst his team has ever seen

Everton’s Abdoulaye Doucoure was subjected to “some of the worst outpourings of abuse” the Premier League has ever seen, reveals the English top flight’s director of content protection Tim Cooper. The vile online messages were sent to the Blues midfielder after he celebrated James Tarkowski’s last-gasp equaliser in front of Liverpool supporters in Goodison Park’s final Merseyside Derby, with the 2-2 draw ensuring the hosts did not finish with a losing record at the ground in the fixture after over 130 years of facing their neighbours.

Doucoure picked up a post-match second yellow card for the incident – giving him a one-match ban – with Reds midfielder Curtis Jones, who piled in to remonstrate against him, also receiving a red card alongside Liverpool head coach Arne Slot and Sipke Hulshoff in separate incidents. An article in the i paper states: “When Doucoure went back to the dressing room, he noticed his Instagram account had ‘lit up.’ There were, by his estimate, ‘thousands’ of direct messages spewing the worst, most vile sort of racism. And they just kept coming for days.

“There was crude text abuse but also a string of gifs and emojis of monkeys and bananas. Even worse, there were death threats to him and his young family. Doucoure decided that he had to take a stand.”

Doucoure subsequently spoke to an audience of around 100 schoolchildren at Goodison Park having insisted upon personally attending a Show Racism The Red Card event, and reflecting upon the matter, he said: “I never used to speak on racism. I just tried to cope and ignore it but sometimes you need to speak on these topics and spread the message.

“I understand the frustration about the celebration I had in front of the Liverpool fans, and I accept that they can criticise and say that wasn’t appropriate, but I’m surprised people use discrimination to hurt you. I received death threats, as well as my family, which is going too far.

“We know this happens every weekend for a lot of players and [now] I want to be an example on how to stand against this and send a strong message to people.”

The i adds that what was particularly shocking was that when both Everton and Liverpool issued a joint statement the next day condemning the abuse “sparked it all off again.” Cooper describes the Doucoure incident as a “drop everything” moment for the league’s 10-person online abuse team, dubbed the troll-hunting unit, which is made up of lawyers and experienced investigators who monitor every top flight match looking for “triggering incidents” such as contentious goals, VAR decisions or even celebrations, and said: “I think that just shows the mentality of the sort of people we’re dealing with.

“It was horrendous in Abdoulaye’s case. The volume of messages was extraordinary. They were all open messages, so he will have just seen his account ‘light up’, and the abuse was really different this time.

“It used to be text-based, but Instagram is very emoji-based. It was awash with monkey and gorilla gifs and it’s the first time we’ve really seen that, and it’s really difficult to filter that out. We can look for text or emojis but it’s much more difficult with video.

“It was spiteful and obvious what was going on, so we were already working to remove posts straight away after it happened, and then we were straight into the player to offer support.”

Thanks to Doucoure’s co-operation and the diligent work of the online abuse team and the police, they are hopeful they will be able to “progress” many of the investigations to something more tangible, even though figures suggest most of the abuse came from other countries.

Cooper added: “It can be incredibly complex and difficult but the Premier League is determined to fight the good fight on this. This is a full-time job for us.”