After the ASEAN Cup final, Manuel Bihr walked past one Indonesian hand on purpose and, by his account, missed another by accident. Within hours his wife’s inbox was full of messages wishing death on her family and calling their children autistic. Ola Bihr has decided to talk about it.

The post that set the tone was not even angry. It was smug. After Port had led Persib until the 87th minute and lost 3-1, the verified Indonesian account Timnas Xtra posted two photographs of Manuel Bihr, one in Thailand white with a runners-up medal round his neck, one in Port orange looking at the floor, and a list.

Got humbled 2-4 by Indonesia. Refused Hubner’s high five. Ignored President Prabowo’s handshake. Got schooled 1-3 by Persib. “Karma,” it concluded, with a crying-laughing face.

Two of those lines are football and fair game. The 2-4 was the penalty shoot-out after a 2-2 draw in which Thailand played the last forty minutes with ten men, which is a humbling of a sort, though not the sort the post implied. Bihr, for the record, took Thailand’s first penalty and scored it. The Persib result is simply true. It is the other two lines, and what was done with them, that this piece is about. By the time Timnas Xtra posted, the man it was laughing at had already spent three days being told, along with his wife and their two children, that they should die.

“Wishing someone’s family and kids death”

Ola Bihr, who has lived in Thailand with her husband for more than ten years, spoke to Football Siam over chat this week. Her first reply, before a single question had been asked, was a better summary than any we could write.

Wishing someone’s family and kids death and cancer is something new to me. We have experience all over the world and this is madness.Ola Bihr

For Tom, as everyone close to him calls him, it began the moment the final ended. His own Instagram post that night was a photograph of himself on the ball at Gelora Bung Karno with a caption that read: “What a final. Congratulations to Indonesia. Thanks for all the support from around the world.” It drew ten thousand comments in a single day. “Mostly hate,” Ola said.

For her it took a little longer, and the delay is the most revealing detail in the whole affair. “I think they take some time to find out about the player and people around them,” she said, “and then share their socials on TikTok and in comments like ‘attack this account, it’s his wife’. So it took a couple of hours and then it started.”

That is not a crowd losing its temper. It is a crowd being pointed. Somebody looked up who Bihr was married to, found her account and posted it with an instruction. Thousands of messages followed into her spam folder, which she has only partly read. Some found her email address. They do not have TikTok, she said, and suspects it is worse there.

The messages sort into three kinds. There are threats: “I will kill your family”, “your family will die”, “if you come to Indonesia I will kill your entire family”. There is the abuse aimed at Ola herself, which is personal and gendered: she is ugly, stupid, a whore; one Indonesian slur for a prostitute recurs; one account simply posted the same line again and again under her pictures, calling her a prostitute and telling her to leave Indonesia. And there is the material about her children, which is the part she is least able to laugh off.

The family had been on holiday in Indonesia. They went, she said, because Arhan, the Indonesia full-back who played alongside Tom at Bangkok, had invited them to see his country. They had a lovely time, and posted the photographs, as families do. When the abuse started, those photographs became the target. Under a picture of the children at breakfast, someone wrote: “Back to ur country with your autism kids.” Another told Tom his baldness was explained by stage four cancer. Football Siam is not publishing the photographs of the children, or anything that shows where the family stayed.

If you use terms like “wish you have cancer” or “you and your autistic kids” as insults, you don’t only insult us. You insult a lot more people.Ola Bihr

One more detail deserves stating plainly, because it complicates the picture rather than simplifying it. Ola says a striking number of the accounts appear to belong to young people. “Shockingly it’s a lot of young girls and boys who use crazy language and insults,” she said. Some of the profiles we have seen bear that out. That is a reason to remove every name from what we publish. It is also, perhaps, the most depressing sentence in this article.

What actually happened on the stage

It is worth being precise about the two charges, because they are different and one of them is not really a charge at all.

The high five was a choice, and Ola does not pretend otherwise. Her account is that Hubner had been “disrespectful towards Thai players several times” during the match, “but that’s OK, it’s football.” What tipped it, she says, was the end: “After the Thai player missed the final penalty, he ran towards the player to celebrate in his face and pushed him quite hard.” So Tom declined Hubner’s hand on the way to the ceremony, “to stand up for his player and fair sportsmanship. This is about football.”

The clip she sent shows Hubner charging into a Thai player amid the celebrations. Whether you call that a push, a barge or a collision in the scramble depends on which shirt you wear, and Football Siam has asked for Hubner’s side of it. But you do not need to settle it to see the point. A senior player refusing an opponent’s high five because he thinks that opponent behaved badly towards a teammate is about as old as football. It is the sort of thing a pundit might call petty, or might call loyal. It is not the sort of thing that has ever previously been answered with threats against a player’s children.

The handshake is a different matter, because by every account available it did not happen as alleged. Ola’s description is detailed and fits the footage. Normally, she says, someone stands behind the presenting dignitary holding the medals, the dignitary shakes the player’s hand, then takes a medal and hangs it. At Gelora Bung Karno, Prabowo held each medal himself, in both hands, and placed it over each player’s head.

Tom greeted everyone the traditional Thai way and said thank you. Since the president was holding the medal himself with both hands, he put it over Tom’s neck, Tom nodded and said thank you and already looked the other way, walking on promptly to get off the stage. The president reached out with his hand after he had already walked on.Ola Bihr

Tom, she says, did not see the hand. He is not certain even now whether it was a handshake being offered or a tap on the back. The footage does not show a refused hand. It shows a player in a losing final bowing his head to receive a medal and leaving the stage at a pace familiar to anybody who has ever had to collect a medal they did not want.

Detikcom, one of Indonesia’s biggest news sites, ran Ola’s explanation under the headline “Thai player did not shake Prabowo’s hand: his wife clarifies”. The explanation was public, in Indonesian, from a mainstream outlet. The messages kept coming anyway.

Football is not politics

Underneath the handshake story is an assumption that Bihr was making a point about Indonesia’s president. Ola finds that assumption almost funny, and his career explains why.

“Everyone who knows Tom will know he is not involved in any politics,” she said. “His mother is Thai, his dad is German, we have lived in Thailand for more than ten years, and he is not in a position to make a political statement for any country.” In an Instagram story she put it more bluntly: why would anyone think they, “especially Tom”, know enough to judge a political position in someone else’s country? “Football is not politics. Move on.”

She believes the two moments were deliberately run together. Some fans, she said, “created a ridiculous scenario that doesn’t even make sense and used it to attack him and especially us as a family.” The Hubner snub was real, so the Prabowo snub must be too. Once a player has been cast as arrogant, every frame of footage can be read that way.

Who is supposed to deal with this?

Nobody has, so far. Tom does not report the messages. “He is busy doing his job and taking care of his family,” Ola said. She reports some accounts, but there are far too many. Neither Port nor the Football Association of Thailand has been in touch, and she is notably relaxed about that. “They know me and Tom aren’t new in the business, and if we need help we will ask them to support us.”

There is something admirable in that, and something that ought to bother the rest of us. Online abuse of footballers is now treated, across most of the world, as an occupational hazard that families absorb quietly. The burden of filtering, blocking and reporting falls on the people being targeted. The platforms do what they do. The federations issue statements when it becomes a story, and it only becomes a story when somebody like Ola decides to talk.

It would be easy, and wrong, to make this a piece about Indonesian football supporters. Indonesia’s fans are some of the most committed in the world, and the overwhelming majority of the 67,000 at Gelora Bung Karno on Monday went home happy and sent nobody anything. Ola makes a sharper point than that. She thinks the people with the reach to stop it, the big Indonesian football accounts and influencers, stay quiet because they are afraid of exactly the backlash her family is getting. She would like them to shame their own.

She would also like the people sending the messages to think for a second about who is on the other end.

Just because you are hiding behind a profile with maybe no photo doesn’t mean you can’t harm anyone. Would you want this to happen to you, or to anyone in your family or close circle?Ola Bihr

It is the part of a footballer’s life that supporters rarely see. “These players and families have their own lives and make many sacrifices for football,” she said. “It can be mentally very draining, to a point that ‘normal’ people will never understand. We love it and we would never complain. But we need to raise awareness that this behaviour is not OK and not normal.”

Her message to the rest is simple, and fair, and deserves the last word.

Football is football. You can joke and make memes about his bald head as much as you want, fine, not a problem. But stay in your lane and don’t attack families and kids. Have some common sense. The world can be a better place if everyone just improves a little bit, shows empathy for each other and stops pushing viral hate.Ola Bihr