Chelsea fan jailed for eight weeks over racist tweets

A Chelsea supporter who posted racist and antisemitic comments on Twitter has been jailed.

Nathan Blagg, 21, posted a series of hateful and offensive tweets on the social networking site between 29 September 2020 and 5 February 2021. 

Today (Friday, 5 November) at Westminster Magistrates’ Court he was sentenced to eight weeks in custody. He had previously pleaded guilty to seven counts of sending by public communication network an offensive or indecent or obscene or menacing message or matter. 

At his sentencing hearing, the CPS applied for an increase in his sentence to reflect the racial hate crime element and Blagg’s sentence was increased from five weeks to eight weeks. 

Blagg was caught after a West Bromwich Albion supporter complained to Chelsea FC about an offensive tweet that referenced former player Cyrille Regis who died in 2018. 

An investigation uncovered that Blagg was a Chelsea season ticket holder and a closer look revealed further offensive tweets. Ahead of a match against Tottenham Hotspur FC he tweeted ‘for the next 48 hours I can tweet as much antisemitism as I like without being told off’. 

Blagg had also posted pictures of mass Holocaust graves, images of Nazi salutes and said that Spurs were on their way to Auschwitz in his public tweets. 

Kalsoom Shah, from the CPS, said: “Nathan Blagg thought hiding behind a screen could shield him from the consequences of posting hateful and abusive content. That is absolutely not the case. 

“Hate crime has a corrosive effect on our society and working with the police, the CPS is committed to rooting it out.”

Earlier this week football fan Jonathon Best, 52, from Feltham was jailed for 10 weeks after he livestreamed himself on Facebook racially abusing three black England players who missed penalties in the Euro 2020 final against Italy. 

Lionel Idan, CPS hate crime lead, said: “Calling out racist language on social media is crucial to bringing offenders of such hate crime to justice. These vile acts have no place in sport or in society. I hope this conviction encourages people to report such hateful crimes in the knowledge that we will prosecute the perpetrators.”