Premier League's Most Toxic Football Fanbases Ranked

Football fans and their behaviour have always been a source of fascination and, at times, frustration. But in today’s hyper-connected world, where opinions fly at the speed of a refresh button, the game off the pitch has become just as noisy as the one on it.

Social media, fan forums, and platforms like Reddit have given supporters a digital megaphone. From debating transfers and player performances to dissecting managerial tactics or even slating club executives, no one is safe from scrutiny. Who would have thought directors of football would one day trend online?

Reddit in particular has become a hub for football discussion, with every Premier League club boasting its own active subreddit. These online spaces offer fans a place to share news, vent frustrations, celebrate wins or spiral into meltdown after a draw at home. But while some communities are constructive and passionate, others have earned a reputation for being toxic.

With that in mind, we conducted a deep dive into the primary subreddit for every Premier League club to uncover the most toxic fan base in the league. The team dug into the number of vulgar comments, non-vulgar comments, total comments and then calculated a total percentage of vulgar comments.

The Premier League’s Potty-Mouthed Table

Top of the league but not in the way they’d hope are Wolverhampton Wanderers fans, who racked up the highest percentage of vulgar comments (7.43%) among all Premier League subreddits. Perhaps frustration bubbled over after a chaotic campaign that saw the sacking of Gary O’Neil and the arrival of Vítor Pereira on an 18-month rescue mission. Wolves finished 16th, narrowly avoiding the drop, but their fans certainly didn’t hold back online.

In stark contrast, Nottingham Forest soared to a seventh-place finish with standouts like Chris Wood, Morgan Gibbs-White, Anthony Elanga, and Callum Hudson-Odoi dazzling throughout the season. Yet Forest fans came in second for vulgarity (7.12%), proving that success on the pitch doesn’t necessarily translate to sweet-tempered supporters. There’s clearly something in the Midlands air this season.

Capital Rage: West Ham and Spurs Vent Online

It wasn’t just the Midlands feeling moody. West Ham supporters clocked in at third (6.59%) for sweary outbursts perhaps understandable after an underwhelming campaign that ended in 14th place, despite a squad boasting the likes of Lucas Paquetá and Mohammed Kudus. The revolving door of managers didn’t help, with neither Julen Lopetegui nor Graham Potter managing to steady the ship of a turbulent season for the Hammers.

Not far behind were Tottenham Hotspur fans, registering a 6.38% vulgarity score. Spurs endured a historically bad season, finishing 17th and setting a Premier League record for the most losses in a single campaign without actually getting relegated, losing 58% of their matches.

Speaking of misfires, Manchester United fans didn’t fare much better. They came fifth in fan vulgarity (6.17%), mirroring a season many would rather forget. The Erik ten Hag era ended in acrimony, Ruben Amorim arrived, Dan Ashworth was shown the door, and Marcus Rashford was loaned to Aston Villa after internal bust-ups. United stumbled to a 15th-place finish, capped off with a painful Europa League final loss to Tottenham, no less.

At the other end of the toxicity table, Fulham take top honours for best-behaved supporters with just 2.23% vulgar comments. Under Marco Silva’s steady guidance, the Cottagers had a quietly impressive season, finishing 11th and continuing their evolution into a stable top-flight side.

They’re followed by Ipswich Town (3.47%), whose relegation didn’t stop fans from keeping things civil. Bournemouth (3.66%), Brighton (4.07%), and Brentford (4.18%) round out the five least foul-mouthed fanbases.

The numbers offer a fascinating look at how fortunes on the pitch can and sometimes don’t shape the mood in the stands and online. Whether you’re venting about VAR, questioning your manager’s tactics, or just having a full-on keyboard meltdown after a dodgy away day, Premier League fans remain some of the most passionate in the world.

Methodology For Finding the Most Vulgar Football Fans in the Premier League

Objective:

The goal of this project is to identify which Premier League fanbases use the most vulgar language on Reddit. By analyzing comments from official club subreddits, we aim to determine which team's supporters are the most profane online.

Data Collection:

We collected data from the following official or popular Reddit communities for each Premier League club and using the Reddit API and Python, we extracted a total of 883,074 comments across these subreddits.

The raw comments were cleaned and preprocessed using Python. This included removing unnecessary characters, normalizing the text, and preparing it for analysis.

Counting Swear Words:

A predefined list of swear words (excluding racial or highly offensive slurs) was used to classify comments. Each comment was checked for the presence of any vulgar word and was labeled as either:

Vulgar – if it contained at least one swear word

Non-Vulgar – if it contained none

Data Analysis:

The final dataset was analysed to produce insights such as pivot tables showing the number and percentage of vulgar comments per team subreddit, the most frequently used swear words overall and the most common swear words per fanbase.

This analysis allowed us to rank fanbases by how vulgar their language tends to be on Reddit, offering an entertaining and data-driven look at football fandom online.

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