A season ticket holder of the UK Chelsea F.C. soccer team has pleaded guilty to posting anti-Semitic and racist hate on Twitter about players and fans, according to police.
Nathan Blagg, 21, made abusive anti-Semitic posts along with offensive tweets about black players, bragging that he could get away with it as it was online, Sky News reported.
In one of his posts, he wrote: "Can't beat days like this, can be as horrible as I like and not be judged it's mint.”
The fan’s tweets were initially flagged by a fan of the West Bromwich Albion soccer team who complained to Chelsea about an offensive tweet referencing one of the team’s former players.
The tweet had been posted after West Bromwich Albion played Chelsea in the fall of 2020.
Chelsea discovered other offensive posts from the username NB__1905 account and sent the information to London police.
On two other occasions in 2020 and 2021 – both before matches between Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur – the owner of the account posted a series of anti-Semitic tweets.
An investigation found that the account belonged to Blagg. Blagg was arrested on February 8 and charge in September.
Prosecutor David Roberts called the offenses “racially aggravated,” noting the “anti-Semitic nature of many of them,” the Daily Mail reported.
Robert told the court that “life-long Chelsea supporter” Blagg had posted to Twitter an image of the train tracks leading to Auschwitz that was captioned: “Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz.”
Other posts featured the same phrase falsely attributed to former health secretary Matt Hancock and a video of Nazi salutes.
Blagg also wrote: “Yids tomorrow, which means for the next 48 hours I can tweet as much anti-Semitism as I want without being told off” and “Gas a Jew, Jew, Jew.”
He also retweeted a doctored image of former Chelsea midfielder and manager Frank Lampard standing over the site of a mass grave from the Holocaust.
“Nathan Blagg thought he could post grossly offensive and abusive messages about other football fans and players with impunity… But this investigation demonstrates that nobody can post racist, anti-semitic or hateful abuse on social media without consequences,” Detective Constable Suzanne Smith, the investigating officer, said.
She added: “Football fans and players are fed up with this kind of toxic discourse surrounding the game on social media and we will use all the policing powers available to us to stop it from happening.”
Blagg will be sentenced in November.