[Saba Sports News] The 2026 World Cup has been underway for more than a month, with at least seven racist incidents publicly reported, while abusive racist remarks have run rampant across online platforms. As many as 89,000 offensive posts were flagged during the group stage alone, and football superstar Kylian Mbappé has emerged as the primary target of such hate speech. The latest controversy sparked widespread outrage. Former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy Brey claimed in an opinion piece that the current French national team “no longer has any Frenchmen left”. The remark enraged French political circles, who unanimously labelled the article malicious commentary laced with racist and xenophobic undertones. Separately, after Paraguay’s elimination from the tournament, a senator from the country took to social media to launch a vicious attack on Mbappé. The politician made discriminatory slurs including “this brute cannot even read or write”, “raised on coconut juice”, and “the most civilised creature he has ever encountered is a chimpanzee”, marking yet another racist incident targeting Mbappé.
The editor believes that the volume of these abusive posts is a full thirteen times higher than that recorded during the 2022 Qatar World Cup, with 11 percent of the content containing racist language — a far higher proportion than seen at the previous tournament. This clearly demonstrates that online racism is spreading at an alarming rate.