When Jessica Davies, the wife of Australia batter Travis Head, spoke about the flood of online abuse aimed at her family following an on-field altercation involving her husband and Virat Kohli, it was clear this was not just another clash between rival fan camps. The intensity of the backlash—and the way it spilled beyond the boundary of sporting disagreement—mirrored the distress Shrestha Iyer described after she was relentlessly targeted for appearing in a light-hearted social media clip linked to the Punjab Kings content setup. These incidents point to something bigger than “passionate fandom” getting out of hand; they reflect a wider, business-driven environment that has, over the last decade, helped cultivate an organised and monetised hate machine—one that has now become difficult to contain.
What began as aggressive social media promotion has, over time, grown into a self-sustaining problem. An industry insider highlighted that there are agencies that can charge anywhere from Rs 25,000 to Rs 2 lakh for the explicit purpose of spreading unrestrained hatred toward a particular player. The same conversation suggested that campaigns can be built around customised inputs, including tailored statistics, and then pushed in a way designed to keep the chosen subject in the spotlight. The insider also noted that the cost structures vary depending on how long a topic stays on trend—whether it is pushed for a few hours or sustained across days.
That shift became possible as cricket’s digital world transformed roughly ten years ago. Social platforms stopped functioning merely as spaces for fan engagement and started operating more like commercial goldmines. In this new arrangement, the size and activity of a player’s social media audience increasingly determined the value of digital endorsement agreements, particularly as traditional advertising earnings tied to linear television faced pressure and contraction. In such a system, a single viral hashtag could potentially convert into endorsement money running into crores, changing incentives for everyone connected to the game’s public image.
Crucially, the ecosystem did not rely on influencers alone. A senior BCCI figure, familiar with how the industry functions, pointed to sports management firms as an important link in the chain. These entities, the official explained, often work on a player’s branding and commercial visibility by identifying accounts and profiles of social media aggregators with a solid follower base, and then engaging them to increase a player’s traction online. As these efforts took hold, fan communities multiplied rapidly, with algorithms rewarding the loudest forms of engagement rather than the most thoughtful ones—favouring outrage over context, insults over analysis, and tribal allegiance over appreciation of the sport itself.
At first, much of this behaviour was dressed up as harmless interaction. But gradually, the same mechanisms that amplified hype could also be used as tools of pressure and manipulation. The insight from those operating around the circuit was that inorganic boosting could work in both directions: it could lift one cricketer’s profile while simultaneously working to systematically discredit another. What no one fully expected was just how quickly the system would drift beyond institutional boundaries, turning into something that could not be easily governed.
Once that line was crossed, the scale of the problem accelerated. Bots could be deployed like organised forces, and rival fan groups could morph into digital mobs. Trends that were initially manufactured began to be treated as if they represented genuine public opinion. Just as importantly, the abuse stopped being directed solely at players. Families became collateral damage—wives, sisters, and even children turning into easy targets in a culture where anonymity reduces accountability and where hatred is treated like a transactional commodity.
That is why Jessica Head and Shrestha Iyer find themselves dealing with the consequences of a cricket-wide commercial ecosystem that, for years, rewarded online polarisation while ignoring the human cost it would eventually bring. The most painful part is the irony: the same setup that once celebrated “engagement metrics” now claims shock at the monster those metrics helped build and sustain.
