Tennis player Jodie Burrage gets death threats on WTA return: ‘I remember why I left’

Jodie Burrage did something tennis careers rarely allow. She stepped off the tour, stopped the travel and gave herself time to reset. When she came back, the British tennis player said the goal was simple: stay happy, stay fit, take it week by week. One main-draw match into her return to the WTA, her inbox answered.

After a three-set defeat, Burrage posted a scrolling video of the direct messages that landed on her Instagram, death threats among them, and wrote a caption that was half sarcasm, half confession: “I remember why I left.” Most of the coverage has filed the episode under betting abuse, which is accurate. What it skips is that last sentence. Burrage did not only report abuse. In her own words, she put it next to the months she spent away from the sport.

The reset she asked for

Before Chennai, Burrage had not played a competitive match since a WTA 125 event in Jingshan in September 2025, according to the Lawn Tennis Association. Speaking to the LTA in March, ahead of Great Britain’s Billie Jean King Cup qualifier against Australia in Melbourne, she described the break without decoration. “I just needed a little bit of time off and a little bit of a reset and it’s been the absolute best thing for me,” she said.

The plan she laid out was a competitor deliberately turning down the volume. In the past, stacking her schedule and chasing ranking points had come first. This time, she said: “My plan is to just get back on tour, take it week by week and enjoy being back out there.” The goal, in her words, “is to stay happy and stay fit.” She called herself “in a really good place physically, probably the best I’ve been in a long time,” and then said something that reads differently now: “I’m just going to enjoy being back on the road, travelling and doing what I love – I’ve not felt that in a long time.”

That is the athlete who walked into the Chennai Open: a former world No. 85, now ranked 474th, according to BBC Sport, playing for the pleasure of competing again.

A set up, then the phone

She won the first set against India’s Vaishnavi Adkar. Adkar fought back and took the match 3-6, 6-3, 7-5. It was the Indian player’s first win at WTA level, Anadolu Agency reported, and Burrage’s first WTA main-draw singles match in 16 months. Her previous one, qualifying aside, was a first-round loss to Caty McNally at Wimbledon in July 2025, BBC Sport noted.

For any player, losing from a set up is a hard result to carry off court. For Burrage, the second bill arrived on her phone. Many of the messages appeared to come from gamblers unhappy that she had lost, the Associated Press reported. Her caption opened with a dry “Nice welcome back” to the tour before the line about leaving.

Germany’s Eva Lys answered on her own Instagram, tagging the WTA with a question: “When will something be done?”

She had already warned about this

None of this is new to Burrage. After that Wimbledon exit in 2025, she told The Guardian she had to stop herself looking at her phone because of online abuse, and urged gambling companies and social media platforms to do more about trolls who, she said, often attack her appearance. At the time she also said players often received hostile messages from gamblers blaming them for lost money, Anadolu recalled.

She is not alone in her own team room either. Katie Boulter, the compatriot and friend with whom she won the deciding doubles against the Netherlands in the 2025 qualifiers, told BBC Sport that year she had received death threats. Coco Gauff said last month that she received an “insane” amount of racist comments after a disputed point against home player Sun Xinran at the China Open, the AP noted.

What the WTA offers, and what it measures

The WTA said its staff in Chennai were supporting Burrage, along with its player welfare and Threat Matrix team. “Protecting players and the wider tennis family from online threats and abuse is a key priority for the WTA,” a spokesperson said. According to Anadolu, the tour offered her a private channel to report abusive direct messages and a moderation service that hides offensive public comments before players see them. The messages have been reported to the platforms, investigations are trying to identify the account holders, and accounts tied to gambling could be referred to a Bad Actor program that lets betting operators act against them.

The Threat Matrix, launched in 2023 with other tennis bodies, pairs artificial intelligence with human analysts and monitors public posts on Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. The WTA’s July report said it secured the removal of 66% of serious abusive posts identified in 2025, escalated 35 accounts to law enforcement, and that 89% of the accounts behind serious abuse in 2024 did not reappear the following year. Data from the Signify Group’s service counted more than 12,000 abusive posts and messages aimed at female players in 2025, a similar figure to 2024, with angry gamblers behind 42% of verified abuse and 59% of serious abuse, BBC Sport reported.

Those numbers count posts and accounts. Burrage’s caption puts a different number on the table: players, and whether they stay. There is also a gap in the design. By Anadolu’s description, the monitoring watches public posts. What Burrage published was a reel of private messages, and the remedy offered to her for those is a channel to report them herself. Players have called for identity verification on social platforms, BBC Sport noted, and the WTA’s player board has previously called the abuse “unacceptable,” with an impact that can be “significant.”

Burrage spent months building a version of the tour she could enjoy, one week at a time. The reporting channel now open to her hands the work of logging each threat, message by message, to the player who stepped away to protect exactly that.

Tags: WTA, Katie Boulter, Chennai Open, death threats, Jodie Burrage