Jodie Burrage Gets Death Threats on Her WTA Return After 16 Months Away

Jodie Burrage waited 16 months for a WTA main-draw singles match, lost it in three sets, and was met with death threats before the day was out. The 27-year-old Briton fell 3-6 6-3 7-5 to Vaishnavi Adkar in the first round of the Chennai Open on Tuesday, then posted an Instagram story scrolling through the direct messages that followed, including death threats, with the message: “Nice welcome back to tour. I remember why I left.”

What happened in the comeback match?

Burrage lost a match she had led. Sky Sports reports the defeat came in her first WTA Tour singles match proper in 16 months, against India’s Adkar, who fought back after dropping the opening set to win 3-6 6-3 7-5. Burrage is ranked 474th in the world, down from a career-high 85 in September 2023, and her previous main-draw appearance, excluding qualifiers, was a first-round loss to Caty McNally at Wimbledon in July 2025. The comeback, in other words, was already a long climb back before a single message arrived. The result itself was unremarkable: a ranked outsider losing a close three-setter to a home wildcard. What made it news was what happened to her phone afterwards.

What did Burrage actually post?

A scroll, not a statement. Sky Sports reports she published an Instagram story with a video scroll of direct messages she had received following the match, including abuse and death threats. Her caption did the talking: “Nice welcome back to tour. I remember why I left.” The sentence lands because it is not really about one match. It suggests the abuse is part of why she stepped away in the first place, and that returning to the tour meant returning to it. This article does not reproduce any of the abusive messages, and readers should not need their wording to understand the story: a player publishing a scroll of threats after a first-round loss is the story, and the threats are documented by her post and by two independent reports of it.

Who backed her, and what did they ask?

Eva Lys, and she asked the governing body directly. The German player tagged the WTA from her own Instagram account and asked: “When will something be done?”, Sky Sports reports. That is a sharper question than a general expression of support, because it names the institution with the power to act and implies that previous condemnations have not been enough. The WTA’s player board has previously condemned the abuse as unacceptable and said its impact can be significant, but Lys is asking for action, not another condemnation. Burrage has asked the same question in different words before: last July she urged gambling companies and social media companies to do more to tackle online trolls, and after Wimbledon she said she had to stop herself from looking at her phone because of the abuse.

Why does Burrage blame gamblers, and how solid is that?

It is her best guess, and she says so herself. Sky Sports quotes her: “I’m just guessing that they’re gamblers; some of them say, ‘You’ve lost me this amount of money’ or whatever, so some of them are.” She added that she did not know, and that the only other explanation she had was that the senders were simply very bad people. The numbers give her guess some support without proving it in her case: a Women’s Tennis Association and International Tennis Federation report found that 458 players were direct targets of abuse in 2024, with 40 percent of social media abuse coming from frustrated gamblers, rising to 77 percent for direct abuse sent to players’ personal accounts. BBC-based reporting adds that female players faced more than 12,000 abusive posts and messages in a single recent year, at a similar level in 2025 to 2024. The pattern is documented. Whether any particular message to Burrage came from a gambler is not.

What fix is Burrage proposing?

Identity verification for social media accounts. Speaking after her Wimbledon defeat, Burrage said: “I think it’s very simple to have someone’s ID connected to their account and that would, I think, quickly stop what people write and make them more accountable,” Sky Sports reports. It is a concrete proposal, not a plea, and it has support from players who have lived the same experience. Katie Boulter told BBC Sport in 2025 that she and her family had received death threats, and warned: “I think it just kind of shows how vulnerable we are. You really don’t know if this person is on site. You really don’t know if they’re nearby or if they know where you live or anything like that.” That safety point is the strongest version of Burrage’s argument: anonymous abuse after a loss is not only unpleasant, it leaves a player unable to tell whether a threat is distant noise or someone nearby. The desk has covered abuse aimed at players before, from Coco Gauff calling out racist abuse after a replayed point at the China Open to Iva Jovic posting the abuse she received after losing her Ningbo Open quarter-final, and Burrage’s case belongs in that line: the abuse follows the result, and the institutions are asked, again, what they will do about it.

What happens next?

Three separate clocks are now running. The tennis one is the slowest: Burrage’s comeback continues from a first-round exit, with a ranking of 474 to rebuild, and her next matches will be watched for results rather than messages. The institutional one is Lys’s question, which now has a name, a tournament and a date attached to it: whether the WTA answers with a step rather than a statement. And the platform one is Burrage’s identity-verification proposal, which has been on the table since July and now has a fresh, public example behind it. The same week has already produced its share of tennis rows, from the Paris Masters director’s comments that angered Djokovic’s supporters to the debate over Zverev’s rise to world No. 1, but Burrage’s story is different from both: nobody is arguing about a ranking or a quote. A player came back after 16 months, lost a close match, and was threatened for it, and the only question that matters now is whether anything changes before the next comeback meets the same reception.