I have to continually shake my head. Its frustration, despair and confusion all rolled into one. What are we to do to stop this epidemic? Every week for the past month there has been a headline regarding a footballer being racially abused and if there was ever a reason to stop being involved in football, this would be it.

The truth is, football has had a horrible past and has always been embroiled with racism. I could have written this article at any point in the last 20 years and that in itself points to a monumental failure of football’s governing bodies and its clubs to eradicate this problem.

Kick It Out, the anti-racism charity in the UK reported that cases of racist abuse rose by 43 per cent last season. That is a horrific statistic. That number is not just professional football either; grassroots football is just as badly affected.

There has been a lot of talk about what players should do if they are targeted by abuse whilst playing. Trevor Sinclair thinks that players should stay on the field and channel their anger to play better, that the racists want them to leave and by doing so a player is giving them what they want. FIFA general secretary Fatma Samoura thinks the opposite, that walking off the field of play sends a clear message and racism will not be tolerated. I can see both points of view and I have nothing against Sinclair or Samoura. They were just answering the question posed. Although, surely it is not just me who finds the idea that it’s the victim’s responsibility to fight racism as disgusting?

Sometimes we view footballers differently due to their fame, fortune and privileged position but for the most part these are just young people earning a living in their profession.  

Imagine you are a young person at an office sending an email to a customer. Within the email you’ve made a tiny mistake and in return you receive a barrage of racist abuse. Everybody sees the abusive email; your boss, your co-workers and even the owner of the company. You look around for support or help and all you get is — “channel your anger into writing better emails”. You would be furious and rightly so!

Of course there are differences in the scenarios. It is certainly much easier to find a person whose name and email address you already possess than to find the culprit in amongst 50,000.

That’s only the on field abuse. Twitter has become a spot for festering trolls to lurk online and, as Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer mentioned, these people are hiding behind fake photos and aliases.

Tammy Abraham, 21, Marcus Rashford, 21, Yakou Meite, 23, and Paul Pogba, 26, have all been targeted in the last week. The age of these men doesn’t make the racism any more or less abhorrent but it does put it a little more into perspective what we are asking them to deal with.

In terms of the online abuse, I think that all social media must really look at how they can combat this crisis. Even if that means a verification of certain details in order to be able to post so that if you decide to cross the line, you can be found and prosecuted.

I think that, particularly in live football, clubs and their governing bodies have to do more. For me, I would start imposing six point deductions to teams whose fans are found guilty of racial abuse, something that could potentially have a serious impact on the clubs. It could cost a title, European football or even status in the league. If you have thousands of people in one place they can be very difficult to police. If the fans are aware that they could potentially lose a lot from racist chanting, I think you’d find it shut down quicker than any set of stewards could do. Clubs too would be much more proactive in stopping racism. They are all probably aware that if they have more troublesome areas of fans then messages would be sent.

I would love to live in a world where racism did not exist in general. It will be hard to ever eradicate racism completely from society, certainly in my lifetime. There are too many backward knuckle draggers with the ability to reproduce that makes me believe it is an almost impossible task.

Not that we should stop trying on that front. I certainly believe that we can, however, get to a point very quickly where our young athletes, both professionally and grassroots, are not subjected to abuse in this way, using the tribal nature of football supporters to force the hand of racists.

You are much less likely to say something out of line if you have 10 men behind you breathing down your neck seething that you might cost the team six points. I imagine if you increase that number to 10,000 the likelihood becomes next to zero.