NFL referee Sarah Thomas is the most hated field judge in the league, and it’s not even close.
Over a 12 month period, betting site Bookmakers.com used Linkfluence — a social listening service — to analyze various search terms and keywords to find which NFL referee received the most hate.
After tabulating the numbers, the site discovered that the first full-time female referee in NFL history has now become the league’s most hated ref after just six years on the job. Bookmakers found that Thomas was directed with over 6000 different negative posts from January 2021 to January 2022. Which was six times more than what the second most hated referee, Carl Cheffers, received at 1053.
Sarah Thomas is the NFL’s most despised referee
Maybe the most fascinating addendum to this hate-filled factoid is that a majority of the posts that came Thomas’ way — 5,473 to be exact — came after she was selected to be a referee last year at Super Bowl 55.
In the site’s research, they also discovered which sport earned the most trolling from their faithful yet often unhappy fanbase. Unsurprisingly, the NFL led the way with over 250,000 negative posts over the time period of the study. The second was soccer, followed by the NBA, NHL, and lastly, MMA.
The numbers were pulled together only from English-language comments. Meaning soccer would have surely finished in the top spot if Spanish, French, and Portuguese, for example, were included in the research.
To collect the data, Linkfluence tracked posts related to over 600 referees, umpires, and officials from major sporting leagues around the world, and analyzed the data to find who received the most online abuse.
The listening data highlighted any words, phrases, hashtags, and emojis which were known to be abusive terms online.
