FORMER Tranmere Rovers player, Marvin Sordell, said online abuse had been one of the factors which contributed to his decision to retire from playing at the age of 28.

Sordell, 30, who played a number of games for Rovers while on loan from Watford in 2010, and would go on to appear for Bolton Wanderers in the Premier League, was one of a number of high-profile former players speaking at the Home Affairs Committee inquiry into online abuse.

He said both physical and online abuse had been given the freedom to flourish, both through the inaction of social media companies and the weak sanctions issued in instances of racism within stadiums.

"We need to find a way for racism not to be allowed to exist within football because at the moment it is allowed to exist," he said. "We find excuses not to go to the root of the problem."

Former West Ham and England defender, Anton Ferdinand, also spoke to the committee, describing the mental health concerns of those facing racial abuse on social media and warning it may take a tragedy for the companies involved to act.

He said: "It is built to make you addicted to it, you can't put it down once you start scrolling. There is a mental health issue of not being able to escape it. My worry is, what are the social media companies waiting for?

"Are they waiting for a high-profile footballer to kill themselves, or a member of their family to commit suicide? Is that what they're waiting for? Because if they're waiting for that, it's too late.

"This comes down to if (the social media companies) really want to make change? So far, their words are that they want to but their actions are different."

Ferdinand suggested similar technology behind predictive text should be used to identify the context of the words being used in a tweet, and if those words were deemed inappropriate the tweet would not be able to be sent.

Former England international Lianne Sanderson said she has received racist, homophobic and sexist abuse online and also called for concerns over privacy to be set aside and for the companies to insist on users providing a government ID to access services.

She said she was convinced that on a number of occasions she had been abused by the same person who was simply using a new account.

Tara Hopkins, director of public policy EMEA at Instagram, and Katy Minshall, head of UK public policy and philanthropy at Twitter, said their platforms proactively took down 95 per cent of hateful content via machine learning.

Committee chair Yvette Cooper confronted them with examples of abuse the MPs had found that had been left up for weeks on the feeds of players like Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rashford.

These included monkey and gorilla emojis and some posts which contained nothing other than one extremely offensive racist word.

"These posts are from five, six, seven weeks ago. If any child following a footballer scrolls through the comments, they will see this abuse," Cooper said.

"Everything you have said to me seems like utter garbage compared to seeing these posts on the screen right now."