Balotelli is most abused Premier League player on Social Media

Liverpool's Italian forward Mario Balotelli was the most abused player with some 8,000 posts, of which more than half were racist in nature.

His team mate Daniel Sturridge and Arsenal's Danny Welbeck were also regular victims.

"I was shocked when I saw that," Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers told reporters on Friday.

"One message is one too many. We support all organisations trying to stamp this out."

More than 95,000 other messages were directed at clubs, with Chelsea and Liverpool featuring most frequently.

"Kick It Out" director Roisin Wood told the BBC the level of abuse was "truly staggering".

"You cannot accept players getting that level of abuse so we want to bring this expert group together to see how we can address this.

"We don't see the problem going away. Some of the perpetrators are young people and they need educating that you cannot sit in your room and abuse people like this. It is also an issue for the social media platforms and how they address this,"

"We must do all we can as a collective to protect those who are on the receiving end of discriminatory abuse" she said.

The organisation wants to form a group with representatives from football, social media and the police to tackle racist, sexist and homophobic abuse on platforms like Twitter.

Kick It Out only started receiving complaints of social media abuse during the 2012-13 season and has since started reporting the incidents to True Vision -- a national reporting facility which had been developed to deal with hate crime online.

The games with the largest volume of discriminatory mentions relating to them were: Chelsea vs. Liverpool in the Capital One Cup on Jan. 27, Sunderland vs. Manchester United in the Premier League on Aug. 24 and Arsenal vs. Manchester City in the Community Shield on Aug. 10.