By Jamie Styles
February 13 – Tom Cleverley has shut down his Twitter account after his own fans abused him on the social media site. The news comes only a day after the midfielder spoke out about the online abuse coming his way and suggested that he has been made a scapegoat for Manchester United’s lacklustre season.
In an interview with the Daily Mirror, Cleverley expressed a desire to prove his critics wrong:
“When I first started getting singled out, it stung, yeah. but it’s something you have got to learn to take when the team is not doing well.
“I would like the fans on my side and it hurts a little bit when you have grown up at the club and love the club every bit as much as the supporters.
“But there are other people in the current United squad who have been through this kind of thing and they have made sure their quality shone through.
“I have got to look at those people. I have learned to take it with a pinch of salt and I’m sure it will make me stronger for the rest of my career.”
However, the abuse he has received on Twitter has seemingly proved too much for the young player to handle, and as of Wednesday lunchtime, Cleverley had deactivated his account.
In doing so, the England midfielder has become the second high-profile footballer to leave Twitter in as many days. On Tuesday, Lazio youngster Joseph Minala left the site after persistent jibes about his age.
He is also not the first United player to quit the social networking site, Darron Gibson, who went on to join Everton in 2012, also left it due to abuse in 2011.
Cleverley’s decision has served to bring ‘Twitter Trolls’ back into the UK spotlight. Recently player-turned-pundit Stan Collymore, who himself has been the victim of abusive tweets, has been vocal in his attempts to rid the site of its obvious dark-side.
It is clear that on Twitter there exists a mob mentality where users will congregate and mercilessly attack a target. And given the tribe mentality of football fans, it is perhaps not surprising that players are commonly targets of online abuse.
In this case however, Cleverley was apparently most affected by abuse from his own fans. Last week Manchester United fans hijacked a Twitter Q&A with Cleverley’s colleague, Michael Carrick, to ridicule the 24-year-old.
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