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Introduction
On June 23, 2026, Ghana played England in a Group Stage match at the FIFA World Cup. The match ended 0-0. But the score was almost absent from the online conversation that followed.
What dominated social media was a gesture that lasted less than three seconds: England defender Djed Spence declined to shake Ghana’s vice-captain Thomas Partey’s hand during the pre-match formalities. Spence walked past Partey without acknowledgement while every other England player completed the handshake. By the time the match ended, Spence’s refusal had been viewed, shared, debated, and condemned worldwide.
Thomas Partey, Ghana’s most capped active player and the team’s defensive midfield anchor, has been charged by the Metropolitan Police Service with seven counts of rape and one count of sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His trial has not yet taken place. He was denied entry into Canada for Ghana’s opening group match but was cleared to travel to the United States, where he played against England in his second appearance of the tournament.
DUBAWA collected tweets mentioning Thomas Partey in the context of the match and conducted a sentiment analysis of the dataset. This explainer reports what we found tells us about how some X users processed the presence of an accused person on the world’s biggest sporting stage, the World Cup.
Methodology: How DUBAWA analysed the tweets
DUBAWA scraped 374 tweets from X over a 36-hour window covering the match period and its immediate aftermath from the morning of June 23 through the afternoon of June 24, 2026. Tweets were scraped using Apify and collected using a keyword search of “Thomas Partey” in combination with terms related to the “Ghana vs. England World Cup match,” “Djed Spence,” and the “rape charges.”
Each tweet was assessed for sentiment using a combination of keyword classifications. We classified tweets into three categories:
Neutral or Reporting: tweets that reported facts, shared video clips, or described events without taking a moral or political position.
Critical of Partey: tweets that referenced the rape charges as grounds for social sanction, praised Spence’s refusal, or used language presupposing Partey’s guilt.
Supportive of Partey: tweets that defended Partey’s right to participate, criticised Spence’s gesture, praised his football performance, or expressed solidarity.
DUBAWA tracked both total views and retweets for each category, because on social media, particularly X, what matters is not just what people said; it is how many people were exposed to it. Views and retweet figures, however, were recorded at the time of collection and may have increased subsequently.
The Numbers at a Glance
| Classification | Tweets | Percentage | Total Retweets | Avg RT/Tweet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neutral / Reporting | 308 | 82.4% | 120,805 | 392 |
| Supportive of Partey | 45 | 12.0% | 5,661 | 126 |
| Critical of Partey | 21 | 5.6% | 13,860 | 660 |
| Total | 374 | 100% | 140,326 | 375 |
The headline figures show that 82.4% of the tweets in the dataset were neutral. Sports media accounts shared video clips, reporters broke news, and commentary accounts described what happened. At first glance, however, the volume figures suggest a muted controversy. Critical voices about Partey accounted for barely 1 in 18 tweets. But volume is a misleading metric here. The more revealing picture emerges when you look at reach and engagement.
Of the 21 tweets that were critical of Partey, just 5.6% of the dataset generated 9.8 million views and 13,860 retweets. The 45 tweets supportive of Partey generated just 4.7 million views and 5,661 retweets. This gap is the most important single finding of the analysis. It tells us that a user scrolling X during or after the match was far more likely to encounter content framing Partey negatively than any other perspective, not because more people felt that way, but because that content was more shareable and more amplified by the platform’s engagement mechanics through retweets.
Thread 1: The Handshake Refusal
DUBAWA found that 139 of the 374 posts analysed (37.2%) explicitly referenced Djed Spence’s apparent refusal to shake Thomas Partey’s hand or debated whether players should engage with him before the match. This suggests that the handshake controversy became one of the central narratives shaping X’s discussion about Partey’s participation at the World Cup.
The moment was first circulated widely by @centregoals, a UK-based football content account with 563,000 followers. His clip of Spence walking past Partey in the handshake line generated 1.5 million views and 420 retweets within hours, seeding the debate into multiple independent communities simultaneously.
Those who praised Spence
Of the 139 posts in the dataset, only 6 supported Spence’s refusal. These accounts framed the gesture as an act of moral integrity, one professional athlete refusing to normalise the presence of an accused person. UK Conservative MP Alicia Kearns weighed in with a post that accumulated 693,000 views and over 700 retweets, stating that Spence had shown ‘conviction’ and that his gesture recognises the seriousness of the charges.
The most retweeted tweet in this segment was from @bob__spurs. His tweet, “In a world full of Djed Spences and Declan Rices, be a Djed Spence,” garnered 4,050 retweets. Spence was framed as a moral actor who refused to normalise the presence of an accused rapist.
While only a small fraction of users explicitly praised Spence, those tweets achieved considerable visibility, attracting more than 3.2 million views. This suggests that endorsements of Spence’s gesture were relatively rare but highly amplified.
Those who criticised Spence
Accounts aligned with Ghana or with Arsenal took the opposite position. These tweets argued that Spence’s refusal was disrespectful of due process and unfair to a man who has not been found guilty of any crime. One with the highest views, @DeclanMode02, tweeted, “Djed Spence thought snubbing Partey would make him look tough. He just looked bitter, petty, and completely classless.” His tweet got 175,456 views and 52 retweets.
The overwhelming majority, 122 tweets out of the 139 posts that explicitly referenced Djed Spence, simply reported, discussed, questioned, or analysed the incident without clearly supporting either position.
In view of this, an interesting finding is that tweets criticising Spence generally attracted far less engagement than tweets praising his action. The leading anti-snub tweet reached about 1.8 million views, whereas the leading pro-Spence tweets exceeded 3 million views, indicating that support for the snub travelled further on X than opposition to it.
Thread 2: The Declan Rice hug
The second major narrative thread was sparked by events after the match. Declan Rice, England’s captain and a former Arsenal teammate of Partey, embraced Partey warmly at the final whistle.
The reaction to Rice’s hug was striking. A segment of X users who had praised Spence’s refusal as principled now turned on Rice for the same reason. Several tweets called for Rice to be stripped of the England captaincy or dropped from the squad. For instance, @PositiviveFeed_ tweeted, “Disgusting from Declan Rice to give Thomas Partey a hug after the match. I can’t believe what I’m watching. He should not be allowed into the England squad again. “This generated about 1,862 views.
The counter-position argued that Rice had done nothing wrong and that maintaining a personal friendship with a man who has not been convicted of any crime is not a moral failure. Several Ghanaian and Arsenal accounts described Rice’s gesture as ‘class’ and ‘loyalty.’
Thread 3: Race and selective outrage
A distinct thread of tweets generating 2.7 million views and 2,100 retweets raised the question of whether the moral outrage directed at Partey was applied consistently or whether race, nationality, and club loyalty shaped who received public sanction and who did not.
One of the most engaged tweets in this subgroup came from @bratzbaee, with 803,342 views and 1,195 retweets: “Declan Rice getting (rightfully) whacked for hugging Partey, but you lot had no qualms with Haaland embracing Hakimi?? None of you cares about the victims. The fake moral outrage when it involves players you hate compared to players you like is something else,” @bratzbaee tweeted.
A similar argument appeared in a tweet by @FelixRomark, which accumulated 846,479 views and 1,445 retweets. The post compared Partey’s situation to that of Benjamin Mendy, a Black French player who was charged with eight counts of rape and ultimately acquitted, and argued that the consistency of public reaction to accused persons of different nationalities and clubs warranted scrutiny.
Several accounts also noted that Djed Spence, being a Black English player, changed the available framing of his gesture. Had a white English player refused Partey’s handshake, multiple tweets argued, it would have been immediately and widely characterised as racial discrimination. Spence’s background effectively neutralised that counter-narrative, which some accounts viewed as a legitimate observation about double standards and others viewed as an irrelevant distraction from the moral question.
Conclusion
A World Cup match between Ghana and England generated 148.8 million views of online conversation. The significance of that conversation was not about the football. It was a set of unresolved social questions: What do we owe to people accused of serious crimes before they are tried? What does a public gesture of refusal or solidarity communicate, and what are its limits? Does the platform’s amplification of outrage constitute justice or its opposite?
This sentiment analysis does not answer those questions. What it does is document how those questions were posed and who was loudest in posing them. The data show that the voices calling for Partey’s public sanction were fewer in number but had greater reach. It shows that the language of legal process, charge, denial, trial, and verdict was frequently substituted for the language of moral verdict in the most viral content.
