Boris Johnson Promises Measures to Protect Soccer Players from Online Abuse

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed Wednesday to enact measures to protect British professional soccer players from online abuse. 

Punishment for someone found guilty of such abuse could include banishment from games.  The move comes after online abuse, some of it racist, was directed at three Black players for the English national team who missed their penalty shots in the Euro 2020 final shootout on Sunday, leading to an Italian win.  According to the Guardian newspaper, an analysis of 585,000 social media posts directed at the English team during the entire Euro 2020 tournament found that 44 messages were explicitly racist. More than 2,000 were "abusive."