Hunting the Football Trolls: Jermaine Jenas review – just who are these faceless, venomous racists?

It might be time to make an official collation for posterity of all documentaries and name it The Catalogue of National Disgrace. The BBC and Channel 4’s combined factual output would give an overview to future generations (assuming there are such things – see under “Climate crisis – causes, complacency, great die-off” in the catalogue) of all the ways we fail ourselves and one another. Because, after all, humanity is a foul pestilence that should be eradicated to give other species a chance to – as one of its worst examples recently had it – build back better. More like “Climate crisis – planet itself quite looking forward to it”.

Hunting the Football Trolls – Jermaine Jenas (Channel 4) looks at an old failure being given a new twist by – what else? – social media. The former professional footballer and current sports pundit investigates the increasing prevalence of online racist abuse directed at players. It is about as uplifting as it sounds.

Jenas’s father was a semi-professional player in an era when the N-word could and would be shouted at him from the stands and racist chants would fill the air with impunity during games. Footage of a televised game from a few decades ago has the commentator noting the “unsavoury barracking of the black players”. Jenas notes that Cyrille Regis and John Barnes began a raising of consciousness and overhaul of what was deemed offensive and unacceptable. That meant that Jenas’s generation never had to face the worst of what were once standard levels of abuse while playing.

He did, however, have to listen to the 50 or so voicemails after every match that would accrue on his phone during the 90 minutes he was playing the beautiful game. Now, of course, social media has supplanted this with its myriad ways and means of reaching anyone with a public profile and the infinite distributive possibilities of anonymous hate speech. The gains made in the physical space are being wiped out by the poisonous online world. The documentary is punctuated by screenshots of exhortations to keep the game white, messages full of the N-word, the C-word, usually replete with monkey and gorilla emojis. The venom directed at Black players during the Euros reached its peak after the England team lost on penalties in the final. Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho became particular targets, and the abuse they received made headlines.

The obvious hope of the programme makers is that they would be able to track down one of the trolls and have Jenas confront him or her. But – who’d have thought it? – the anonymous disseminators of bile prove so unwilling to stand publicly by their claims that the film has to settle for a brief and unsatisfying interview with a (still anonymous and masked) young man who has been involved with an online racist group, who posted abuse but never addressed players directly.

More substantial is the detailing of the work being done by a specialist police unit investigating online abuse of players and consideration of how the trolls might be cut off at source. How, in other words, social media companies might bestir themselves and their almost limitless powers and coffers to clear racists off their platforms. The programme’s focus (otherwise kept very tightly on footballers) widens towards the end to outline how social media companies have no incentive to regulate themselves when turning platforms into a cesspool of controversy drives clicks and advertising revenue, and how the monetisation of conflict is normalising it in wider society.

The police unit is hampered by the slow response from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others to requests for information, which often pushes prosecution attempts over the time limit. Ordinary citizens fare even worse, mostly fobbed off – as anyone who has tried to report offensive posts or dedicated trolling will know – with generic responses or assertions that “after investigation we find that this content does not breach our community guidelines”. The forthcoming – one day, maybe – online safety bill may change things for the better, as similar legislation is beginning to do in Germany. Until then, that catalogue keeps growing.