At the top of every page on the Premier League’s official fantasy football website is the logo for No Room For Racism, the league’s campaign to combat discrimination “wherever it exists in society”. But on the league’s own website, that seems a difficult task.

An investigation by The Athletic has discovered that the Fantasy Premier League game is rife with extreme racist language, with more than 130 team names including the word n****r and hundreds more mentioning Hitler, the Nazis, and making deeply offensive references to Jews and the Holocaust.

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More than 250 team names featured highly offensive anti-LGBT slurs such as “p**f,” “f*****s” and “b** boys” at the same time as the league tries to combat homophobia through its Rainbow Laces campaign. Hundreds of other team names referenced rape and paedophilia, while more than 1,500 team names contained offensive slurs about disability.

Thousands more team names used offensive swear words like “c**t” and “fuck,” including many examples of abuse targeted at individuals, such as three teams called “Fuck Richard Masters,” the league’s chief executive. We have not published screengrabs for most of these examples as we didn’t feel the language was appropriate.

These names are against the game’s rules but still make it through the filters. This is not a minor problem — as many as one in 1000 of the game’s 7.5 million accounts have been flagged as using potentially offensive team names, according to a professor of statistics who analysed the data for The Athletic.

While the Premier League’s anti-discrimination campaigns are becoming more and more vocal, the problem of fighting bigotry is shifting from the pitch and the stands to the internet, especially during these times of no crowds. Football is coming under more and more pressure to clean up its act online, from removing racist content to moderating the waves of “pornbots” flooding club social media accounts with spam.

The Fantasy Premier League (FPL) uses extensive automatic and human moderation tools to root out offensive names, with repeat offenders booted off the platform for good. And thousands of the examples mentioned above were quickly changed when flagged by The Athletic, with a league spokesperson saying “there is no place for discrimination in football”. 

But with a significant minority of FPL users keen to use the most offensive words imaginable in their fantasy football team names, the tide of bigotry is hard to stop.

The Athletic was alerted to the scale of this problem by Adrian Barnett, a professor of statistics at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. He downloaded every FPL team name using the website’s API, or Application Programming Interface. Once he had downloaded details for all 7.5 million teams he began searching for offensive terms.

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While some users try to “hide behind phonetical spelling or odd punctuation,” he says, many do not bother. Typing in the n-word without asterisks brings up lots of results.

Searching through these names is still not a straightforward process, says Barnett.

For example, a search for “Nazi” brings up references to “Internazionale,” the official name of Inter Milan, while “Nazir” is a common Asian name. An account named after the former Blackburn player Tugay may be flagged as potentially homophobic, while a reference to Grasshoppers Club Zurich may be flagged for using the word “ass”. Similarly, the word “Jews” may be used in a deeply offensive way, or be used innocuously by a Jewish person referring to their own community.

“The league do make checks of names, and there’s around 0.1 per cent of users with a team name of “CHANGED NAME,” indicating that the FPL has changed their name because it was offensive,” says Barnett. “That’s a high percentage of bad behaviour (1 in 1000 users).”

“It’s clear the FPL are trying but they are missing a lot of problems and I think their automated systems could be improved by adding more search terms. They might also want to make it easier for users to report bad behaviour, perhaps with a button on everyone’s page, as automated checks will never be 100 per cent accurate.”

The Premier League’s international popularity compounds the problem. For example, the FPL quickly removed hundreds of team names when they were flagged by The Athletic. But a word like “m***” is more complicated because Mongolia is a country and Mong is a relatively common name in parts of Asia.

Despite these complications and caveats, unquestionably racist team names were easy to find.

More than 130 team names include n****r, spelled in full. (There are likely to be many more examples using unconventional spellings to evade filters.) The sample includes uses of the word targeted at specific players including Inter Milan’s Romelu Lukaku and Chelsea’s Antonio Rudiger.

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Troy Townsend is head of development for Kick It Out, an organisation which combats racism in football. “This shouldn’t be anything that we are surprised about,” he tells The Athletic. “Online gaming platforms are riddled with racial hatred and other forms of discrimination, and have continued to be for far too long.”

Removing racist language should be a “massive priority” for organisations like the Premier League, he says. “There should be no excuses, whether it’s one user or a thousand users.”

This is not the first time that racism in Fantasy Premier League has become a big issue. Last year the competition’s overall winner, Aleksandar Antonov, was suddenly stripped of his title. According to the Daily Mail, this was because Antonov made racist comments about Manchester City’s Raheem Sterling in a private Facebook chat. The prize was passed on to Joshua Bull, who originally came second.

Alongside racist language targeted at black people, FPL team names include a large volume of anti-Semitic abuse. More than 250 teams involve Hitler (spelled correctly), while many more reference the Nazis and the Holocaust, including references to “ovens” and “gas chambers”. Eleven teams were called “Hitler Youth” while three included the swastika character “卍”.

There were also several hundred team names including the word “y**”, an anti-Semitic slur which has been adopted by fans of Tottenham Hotspur as a reference to the club’s historic Jewish connections. Many high-profile Jewish figures have spoken out against this.

Others disagree, including Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle and a Spurs fan, who spoke to The Athletic last year. “I will proudly chant ‘Come on you Y***,’” he says. “I think it is ludicrous to describe something that is said with affection, by people who mean it with affection, towards people who receive it with affection, as being racist.”

Dave Rich is director of policy at the Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity that works to protect the Jewish community from antisemitism. He says “y**” is an “anti-Semitic insult” which should have “no place in football”.

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While FPL team names like “Y** Army” may have affectionate intentions, other names, such as “Y** Killers”, clearly do not.

“Online games are increasingly exploited by racists to spread anti-semitism and extremism, and even something as innocent as a fantasy football league is not immune,” says Rich. “Tackling racism in football does not stop at the stadium turnstiles, and the Premier League need to urgently put moderation controls in place to prevent this happening again.”

Homophobia is also widespread in Fantasy Premier League, including hundreds of references to “p***s,” “f*****s” and “b** boys”.

Robbie de Santos is associate director of communications and campaigns at the LGBT rights charity Stonewall.

“This not only shows a problem with homophobia and biphobia among sports fans but also how online anti-LGBT abuse and behaviour continues to be a serious issue,” he says. ‘Tackling offensive comments and names is a crucial part of helping LGBT people feel welcome and able to be themselves in sport, whether on the field or online.”

The Premier League’s Rainbow Laces campaign is aimed at giving people the confidence to tackle homophobic abuse and show visible support for LGBT fans, work which is made harder by offensive abuse online, says de Santos.

“Online platforms and organisations should be telling users how to report unacceptable anti-LGBT abuse and deal with incidents like these seriously and swiftly. Anyone participating in fantasy football can also play their part in kicking out discrimination by reporting these offensive team names.”

Alongside these examples of racism and homophobia, The Athletic found many more offensive team names, including more than 1,500 which used slur words about people with disabilities, including “m***”, “s*****c” and “r****d”. (These were all clearly offensive and not, for example, referring to Mongolia.)

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There were also hundreds of references to “rape” and “rapists”, and hundreds of team names which referenced the crimes of high-profile figures convicted of sexual offences against children. There were also several team names which linked well-known footballing figures to rape and paedophilia, references which are completely unsubstantiated, and likely to be highly defamatory.

Nobody in positions of authority in the Premier League or its clubs want to see this sort of thing on a public platform that is popular with children, and with people of all races and sexualities all over the world. The league has been making some efforts to combat the issue of racist FPL names, although it clearly has not managed to stop the problem.

However, rooting out racism from fantasy football may be more complex than just slur words in team names.

Barnett, the professor who alerted The Athletic to the problem, spotted the possibility of a more subtle form of discrimination. While 36 per cent of Premier League footballers are black, there are multiple teams which contain no black players at all. Barnett says this happening by chance is “incredibly rare”, suggesting some players are intentionally omitting black players from their squads.

He also spotted hundreds of team names which do not include overt racial slur words but support political movements which go against the Premier League’s messaging on race, including ‘White Lives Matter’ and names supportive of the EDL, the English Defence League.

For all the subtleties and complexities of the issues of moderating offensive words online, there are clearly a large volume of people who are extremely committed to giving their fantasy football team names which use deeply offensive terms and reference some of history’s darkest moments and society’s most disturbing taboos.

Some people seem sufficiently motivated by this to make life difficult for the FPL’s moderation systems, such as setting up new accounts and changing names frequently in order to evade the filters. This makes the problem hard to stop in its entirety.

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It also means the league’s anti-discrimination campaigns still have a lot of work to do.

“The Premier League will not tolerate discrimination in any form, anywhere. We strongly condemn offensive and abusive behaviour and remain committed to tackling all forms of discrimination,” a spokesperson told The Athletic. “The League undertakes wide-ranging action and works closely with its longstanding partners Kick It Out, Stonewall and colleagues at The FA and EFL to make it clear there is no room for discrimination in football.”