Personal attacks and name calling of players

OverratedOpinion

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We are going through our worst period as a club in most of our lifetimes. There isn't a lot to be happy about and whole lot to be frustrated about.

As such there is justifiably a huge amount of criticism about form and individual quality. This makes total sense and not addressing it would be burying our heads in the sand.

With this unfortunately seems to come a slightly more nasty side. Obviously this spikes when we lose but even just in general there seems to be an absolute flood of ad-hominem attacks on the players and the manager.

I think that ultimately there will be some big decisions to be made about a lot of players in our squad. A number of them are not good enough for what we want to do. However I don't think that we have a group who don't care or are actively disrespecting the club. Calling them pricks and clowns just seems jarring to me.

I spend a good amount of time on here and call me over sensitive but it just feels toxic and unpleasant. Anyway, feel free to close this mods as I'm not even sure where this goes, just really started to grate.
 
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Yes, agreed. And I think this is a conversation worth having (or maybe rather: a comment worth making), as it has become a big irritant on the forum.

This got significantly worse during the the second and third years of Ten Hag's tenure. We (as mods) want it to end, and hence for example the note we added to the OP of the Amorim thread. I remove (and warn where necessary) posts that purely serve to insult, belittle or wind up other posters, as well as posts that are abusive towards United players and staff.

We can't see everything though, so please report posts you think cross the line, and we'll have a look.
 
Cheimoon said:
Yes, agreed. And I think this is a conversation worth having (or maybe rather: a comment worth making), as it has become a big irritant on the forum.

This got significantly worse during the the second and third years of Ten Hag's tenure. We (as mods) want it to end, and hence for example the note we added to the OP of the Amorim thread. I remove (and warn where necessary) posts that purely serve to insult, belittle or wind up other posters, as well as posts that are abusive towards United players and staff.

We can't see everything though, so please report posts you think cross the line, and we'll have a look.
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I think a bit of leeway needs to be given towards criticism of performances etc, we don't need to go full RAWK... Some lads need to cop the feck on, and maybe giving people with say 50,000 posts a way to flag shit straight away would help, not sure if it's possible, xenforo or not.
 
OverratedOpinion said:
We are going through our worst period as a club in most of our lifetimes. There isn't a lot to be happy about and whole lot to be frustrated about.

As such there is justifiably a huge amount of criticism about form and individual quality. This makes total sense and not addressing it would be burying our heads in the sand.

With this unfortunately seems to come a slightly more nasty side. Obviously this spikes when we lose but even just in general there seems to be an absolute flood of ad-hominem attacks on the players and the manager.

I think that ultimately there will be some big decisions to be made about a lot of players in our squad. A number of them are not good enough for what we want to do. However I don't think that we have a group who don't care or are actively disrespecting the club. Calling them pricks and clowns just seems jarring to me.

I spend a good amount of time on here and call me over sensitive but it just feels toxic and unpleasant. Anyway, feel free to close this mods as I'm not even sure where this goes, just really started to grate.
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Has been happening for years. Theres some really childish posters on the forum, these days.
 
JakeC said:
I think a bit of leeway needs to be given towards criticism of performances etc, we don't need to go full RAWK... Some lads need to cop the feck on, and maybe giving people with say 50,000 posts a way to flag shit straight away would help, not sure if it's possible, xenforo or not.
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I agree, I think actual criticism of performances is totally fine.

Just as an example, that Garnacho miss earlier. If someone says "what a crap strike!" I see no issue with that. Or even criticising his finishing as a whole.

But I am seeing more and more of people saying things like "what a useless wanker" or whatever it might be.
 
No. This club is too easy to play for. We shouldn't put up with this garbage.

Old Trafford is very forgiving and fair with a few exceptions.

Being a united player makes you a global star instantly. Play like it. People died for this club.

If you're shit you deserve to be called out. If you don't try you should be booted out.
 
RedDevilCanuck said:
No. This club is too easy to play for. We shouldn't put up with this garbage.

Old Trafford is very forgiving and fair with a few exceptions.

Being a united player makes you a global star instantly. Play like it. People died for this club.

If you're shit you deserve to be called out. If you don't try you should be booted out.
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I personally think you can hold all those opinions without personally attacking or insulting players.
 
OverratedOpinion said:
I personally think you can hold all those opinions without personally attacking or insulting players.
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With social media it's always going to happen. Especially watching this dross every week.

My problem is I started the Bruno Time to Leave thread. It was deleted and I was called useless or that my opinion matters more. Etc. I estimate half of our fans want him gone so that discussion should happen. Many of our fans think it's bad to say a once great player should leave or that an academy player is a disgrace. Or a young player will never make it.

I'm sorry I have high standards. I was here during the Rooney and Ronaldo era. Back then even Nani was called out and he'd be our best player now by a distance.
 
It doesn't help. The players didn't show a lack of fight against Spurs, it was just a lack of quality, especially up front. From the quotes from Amorim and Dalot recently they know they're in contention for being the worst United side in the Premier League's history. Part of you wants to show the players a list of all the negative records they could break this season and challenge them to prove they not THIS bad but it's no use because it's not a lack of effort. I'm afraid we have to work with what we've got until the end of the season.
 
OverratedOpinion said:
I think that ultimately there will be some big decisions to be made about a lot of players in our squad. A number of them are not good enough for what we want to do. However I don't think that we have a group who don't care or are actively disrespecting the club. Calling them pricks and clowns just seems jarring to me.
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So under these rules will it still be okay to call players who blatantly don't care and are disrespecting the club and its fans pricks and clowns? Or do we have to pretend that, say, Jadon Sancho (still technically a Manchester United player, folks!) is fully committed to the cause and never once acted like a lazy tosser? If it's not a blanket ban, how would who's eligible for personal insults be decided? Vote threads on whether a player is just a good-hearted lad trying his best or a lazy scumbag who only cares about picking up his pay cheque? I feel like it's important to be totally clear about these things if there's going to be a crackdown.
 
Aretak said:
So under these rules will it still be okay to call players who blatantly don't care and are disrespecting the club and its fans pricks and clowns? Or do we have to pretend that, say, Jadon Sancho (still technically a Manchester United player, folks!) is fully committed to the cause and never once acted like a lazy tosser? If it's not a blanket ban, how would who's eligible for personal insults be decided? Vote threads on whether a player is just a good-hearted lad trying his best or a lazy scumbag who only cares about picking up his pay cheque? I feel like it's important to be totally clear about these things if there's going to be a crackdown.
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Is it really necessary to call a player a ‘prick’ or a ‘tosser’ for football reasons?
 
RedDevilCanuck said:
No. This club is too easy to play for. We shouldn't put up with this garbage.

Old Trafford is very forgiving and fair with a few exceptions.

Being a united player makes you a global star instantly. Play like it. People died for this club.

If you're shit you deserve to be called out. If you don't try you should be booted out.
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I couldn't disagree more.

United is by far the most difficult club to play for, when times are tough. Every single pundit and journo out there uses all the tricks they can think of to make life difficult for our club. The last thing our players need is their own fans constantly getting on their backs with extreme abuse.

That's not maintaining standards, it's literally making the environment around the club toxic. Something we've seen countless players succumb to over the last decade.


If a player isn't good enough, hopefully he'll be forced out of the team by a better player sooner or later. Abusing your favourite target until he's had enough and wants to leave does absolutely nothing to help the club.

Support the team. As a fan, that's your role in trying to bring success. Have a moan with your mates. Discuss how things can improve. But abusing the players in public social media has a negative effect when it happens so often, I'd be surprised if you don't realise this.
 
Valencia Shin Crosses said:
What does it mean to “insult a player” then?
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I think, this is where this effort will fall down a cliff. I can see OPs point and I agree with it, it should be possible to talk about football without getting vile. But at the same time, people are different. I think, it is a good idea to deal with overly harsh and unjust posts and the use of obvious swearwords but we will always find posts offensive or unjust. Success or failure breed hyperbole and we will always deal with people trying to get attention on their posts, calling players or managers "not good enough" or "worst since" or calling talents "generational" or players "legends".

The bad times will stick around for a while (is my guess at least) so frustration and venting will also stick around. Better just skip posts that are overly harsh because actively fighting it will most likely only fuel the 2nd instance of a top red debate.
RedDevilCanuck said:
With social media it's always going to happen. Especially watching this dross every week.

My problem is I started the Bruno Time to Leave thread. It was deleted and I was called useless or that my opinion matters more. Etc. I estimate half of our fans want him gone so that discussion should happen. Many of our fans think it's bad to say a once great player should leave or that an academy player is a disgrace. Or a young player will never make it.

I'm sorry I have high standards. I was here during the Rooney and Ronaldo era. Back then even Nani was called out and he'd be our best player now by a distance.
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You can have high standards as much as you want. Nobody here really cares about opinions itself, but the way those are expressed. I guess your thread has been deleted because the same stuff is already written about in his performance thread (and for the record: I didn't expect a delete as well, given that I spent 20 minutes to type a post in it). But all your points here, once great player leave; academy player disgrace; will never make it - it is just unnecessary hyperbole. Drama for an unknown sake. Most likely only for the sake of drama itself. Everybody knows that we suck right now, no need to act as if your standards are higher than others.

There are enough rival fans who think we are shit and this or that. I think, there is no point in being more cruel towards our own players than rival fans are. Cry for upgrades, describe how another player would be more suited. Theres just no need to use insults to bring your message across.
 
JakeC said:
I think a bit of leeway needs to be given towards criticism of performances etc, we don't need to go full RAWK... Some lads need to cop the feck on, and maybe giving people with say 50,000 posts a way to flag shit straight away would help, not sure if it's possible, xenforo or not.
Click to expand...
RedDevilCanuck said:
No. This club is too easy to play for. We shouldn't put up with this garbage.

Old Trafford is very forgiving and fair with a few exceptions.

Being a united player makes you a global star instantly. Play like it. People died for this club.

If you're shit you deserve to be called out. If you don't try you should be booted out.
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Nobody is saying you can't criticize what's going on. The point is simply this:
OverratedOpinion said:
I personally think you can hold all those opinions without personally attacking or insulting players.
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That doesn't stop anyone from criticizing whatever they want, even very harshly. Just without the personal insults.
 
RedDevilCanuck said:
With social media it's always going to happen. Especially watching this dross every week.

My problem is I started the Bruno Time to Leave thread. It was deleted and I was called useless or that my opinion matters more. Etc. I estimate half of our fans want him gone so that discussion should happen. Many of our fans think it's bad to say a once great player should leave or that an academy player is a disgrace. Or a young player will never make it.

I'm sorry I have high standards. I was here during the Rooney and Ronaldo era. Back then even Nani was called out and he'd be our best player now by a distance.
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The thread wasn't deleted, just the relevant posts moved to the performance thread (where they belonged) and the rest deleted (since it no longer had a context).

And again, we're not censoring criticism or telling people what to think. We're just trying to take the toxicity out of conversations.
 
OverratedOpinion said:
We are going through our worst period as a club in most of our lifetimes. There isn't a lot to be happy about and whole lot to be frustrated about.

As such there is justifiably a huge amount of criticism about form and individual quality. This makes total sense and not addressing it would be burying our heads in the sand.

With this unfortunately seems to come a slightly more nasty side. Obviously this spikes when we lose but even just in general there seems to be an absolute flood of ad-hominem attacks on the players and the manager.

I think that ultimately there will be some big decisions to be made about a lot of players in our squad. A number of them are not good enough for what we want to do. However I don't think that we have a group who don't care or are actively disrespecting the club. Calling them pricks and clowns just seems jarring to me.

I spend a good amount of time on here and call me over sensitive but it just feels toxic and unpleasant. Anyway, feel free to close this mods as I'm not even sure where this goes, just really started to grate.
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Could not agree more. I have been on football forums since early 2000s and this trend of personal attacks on players / name calling is jarring.
 
I totally agree with the poster's comments. I am quite new to the Caf but there does seem to be a lot of negativity on here at times. I get that United's results affect all of us and for many, football is an escape from life's challenges which can make more poor results even harder to take. Venting frustrations at individuals is probably a natural reaction but it obviously does not help anything. As a fan, all we can bring is support and optimism that the "next game will be better". I do believe every squad member is giving there all regardless of what the collective result ends up being.
 
NZT-One said:
I think, this is where this effort will fall down a cliff. I can see OPs point and I agree with it, it should be possible to talk about football without getting vile. But at the same time, people are different. I think, it is a good idea to deal with overly harsh and unjust posts and the use of obvious swearwords but we will always find posts offensive or unjust. Success or failure breed hyperbole and we will always deal with people trying to get attention on their posts, calling players or managers "not good enough" or "worst since" or calling talents "generational" or players "legends".

The bad times will stick around for a while (is my guess at least) so frustration and venting will also stick around. Better just skip posts that are overly harsh because actively fighting it will most likely only fuel the 2nd instance of a top red debate.

You can have high standards as much as you want. Nobody here really cares about opinions itself, but the way those are expressed. I guess your thread has been deleted because the same stuff is already written about in his performance thread (and for the record: I didn't expect a delete as well, given that I spent 20 minutes to type a post in it). But all your points here, once great player leave; academy player disgrace; will never make it - it is just unnecessary hyperbole. Drama for an unknown sake. Most likely only for the sake of drama itself. Everybody knows that we suck right now, no need to act as if your standards are higher than others.

There are enough rival fans who think we are shit and this or that. I think, there is no point in being more cruel towards our own players than rival fans are. Cry for upgrades, describe how another player would be more suited. Theres just no need to use insults to bring your message across.
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Yeah I mean this has sort of been my point when people say we “ abuse” our players. I personally don’t think calling a player who’s lazy and awful a “shit player” to be abuse at all. I’m not screaming at him in public. I’m not personally insulting his family or wishing punishment on him.

But these guys are generationally wealthy professional athletes playing at the pinnacle of the sport for a historically successful club. With that privilege, comes extremely high standards (or it should at least) and the expectation of excellence. When they aren’t at that level I think fans should be free to call it out and not have to mince words on an online forum about the club.
 
Cheimoon said:
The thread wasn't deleted, just the relevant posts moved to the performance thread (where they belonged) and the rest deleted (since it no longer had a context).

And again, we're not censoring criticism or telling people what to think. We're just trying to take the toxicity out of conversations.
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The post was about Bruno as a whole, not just his performance today.

Taking the "toxicity" out of conversations is consoring whether you think it is or not.

That thread should be on this forum and it would spark great banter.
 
RedDevilCanuck said:
The post was about Bruno as a whole, not just his performance today.

Taking the "toxicity" out of conversations is consoring whether you think it is or not.

That thread should be on this forum and it would spark great banter.
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Obviously, modding includes censoring, I'm not denying that. I'm just saying we're not censoring criticism as such - just how it's expressed.
 
There should obviously be a line, but i think people are being way too sensitive here. Lets say one of our players get a dumb red card, are we then really not allowed to call him a clown? I think there should at least be a higher tolerance in the match threads. It’s still a football forum, not a book club.

“What our player just did was a poor attempt at an unnecessary tackle. It was far away from our goal and there was no reason to go in with studs up.”

I think it’s fine calling him a clown instesd of writing all that.
 
Of course insults aren't cool. But it's part and parcel of a once great club crumbling to its core. Why are we so desensitized to this downward spiral?

We are beyond a laughing stock. Rival fans simply expect us to lose. What's next - SYMPATHY from rivals. It's not far off.
 
Valencia Shin Crosses said:
Yeah I mean this has sort of been my point when people say we “ abuse” our players. I personally don’t think calling a player who’s lazy and awful a “shit player” to be abuse at all. I’m not screaming at him in public. I’m not personally insulting his family or wishing punishment on him.

But these guys are generationally wealthy professional athletes playing at the pinnacle of the sport for a historically successful club. With that privilege, comes extremely high standards (or it should at least) and the expectation of excellence. When they aren’t at that level I think fans should be free to call it out and not have to mince words on an online forum about the club.
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'Shit player' or 'playing like shit' are fine with me. We're not demanding that people are eloquent or subtle. It's stuff like 'get up you fecking cnut' or 'get this little shit out of my club' that's taking things too far.

And everything is also context-dependent, of course.
 
OverratedOpinion said:
We are going through our worst period as a club in most of our lifetimes. There isn't a lot to be happy about and whole lot to be frustrated about.

As such there is justifiably a huge amount of criticism about form and individual quality. This makes total sense and not addressing it would be burying our heads in the sand.

With this unfortunately seems to come a slightly more nasty side. Obviously this spikes when we lose but even just in general there seems to be an absolute flood of ad-hominem attacks on the players and the manager.

I think that ultimately there will be some big decisions to be made about a lot of players in our squad. A number of them are not good enough for what we want to do. However I don't think that we have a group who don't care or are actively disrespecting the club. Calling them pricks and clowns just seems jarring to me.

I spend a good amount of time on here and call me over sensitive but it just feels toxic and unpleasant. Anyway, feel free to close this mods as I'm not even sure where this goes, just really started to grate.
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So do I and you're not wrong
 
With hundreds of millions of fans, it is inevitable that some of our fans are nasty jerks.
 
Cheimoon said:
Obviously, modding includes censoring, I'm not denying that. I'm just saying we're not censoring criticism as such - just how it's expressed.
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Why don't you come out with a list of words that aren't allowed then? Funny how when the likes of Ralf, Martial, Pogba were getting dogs abuse, we didn't have this level of censorship but for Ole and now Bruno it's a different standard.
 
Cheimoon said:
The thread wasn't deleted, just the relevant posts moved to the performance thread (where they belonged) and the rest deleted (since it no longer had a context).

And again, we're not censoring criticism or telling people what to think. We're just trying to take the toxicity out of conversations.
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Yeah but Cheimoon, this poster was here when Rooney was! They surely deserve some form of special dispensation to call Onana a useless feckdoll for this reason?!
 
We cant fix social media, but we can prevent this place from turning in to the cesspool that is United fans on X and Facebook. Completely agree with OP.
 
Personal attacks and name calling are obviously childish and toxic, but I don't really know where is the fine line between "attacking" a player and just "criticizing him". Tough job for the mods tbh, because you don't want to read numerous posts calling our players "worthless scum" or "useless trash", but at the end of the day you don't want the forum to turn into peak RAWK and promote only delusional, out-of-touch posts. I actually think we're in quite a good spot - overly dramatic and not very constructive criticism is not encouraged, multiple threads on the same issue are being deleted (that makes the forum much more functional) but still I don't feel like I can't write that Hojlund's first touch is utter shite or that Dalot is driving me mad with his lack of football IQ.
 
I get what your saying and there is no place for personal insults, but there's also another side to it.

These players are playing for Manchester United, and with that comes an element of scrutiny. In years gone by, the standards at Manchester United have been so high only the best got the chance to put on a shirt and play out at Old Trafford in front of sell out crowds.

Some of these players are on big, big wages. Match going fans are paying big, big money - not just in ticket prices but also travel, food, drink, merchandise etc.

The players have to accept that there is going to be an element of fan backlash when they are playing like the Dog and Duck on a Sunday. They have made Manchester United into a laughing stock this season and that is not acceptable. They should absolutely be held accountable, much like the circus that is in charge of the club as a whole.
 
OverratedOpinion said:
I agree, I think actual criticism of performances is totally fine.

Just as an example, that Garnacho miss earlier. If someone says "what a crap strike!" I see no issue with that. Or even criticising his finishing as a whole.

But I am seeing more and more of people saying things like "what a useless wanker" or whatever it might be.
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I assume you're talking about the matchday thread? There's more leeway in that thread, given people are reacting emotionally to the game in real-time. Also, no mod can read every post and we do want to watch the match too.
If you treat the matchday thread as a pub conversation, I don't think it's an issue if you call a player who fluffs a sitter 'a useless tosser' or a 'stupid bastard' if they give away the ball badly. Me and my mates would jibe each other along similar lines.
It's more of an issue in other threads and is very much context dependent and case by case for me. People are angry and will vent.
 
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