According to a new report, Manchester United'sRonaldo and Harry Maguire have received the most abuse on social media.
Seven out of 10 top-flight players were affected by abusive posts in the first half of last season.
Eight of the abuse came from United.
The majority of fans use social media in a responsible way according to the study.
Ofcom's group director for broadcasting and online content said that the findings shed light on a dark side to the game.
It requires a team effort to tackle online abuse.
There are two peaks in the amount of abuse on social media.
On the day thatRonaldo came back to Manchester United, he generated three times more social media traffic than any other day, with 3,962 of them being abusive. The daily average is slightly higher at 2.5%.
Because of his large following, the volume of posts can be accounted for. The Portugal forward was mentioned in almost all of the abuse that was directed at him.
On November 7th, the second peak came when defender Maguire apologized for Manchester United's loss to Manchester City.
Almost 3% of the total that day was devoted to abusive posts, with many users reacting to the post with offensive language.
The same phrase was used in 69 different instances by different users within two hours.
According to the study, it is possible that users saw the abusive message and decided to duplicate it.
Understanding the organization of online abuse is of increasing interest given the harm caused by co-ordinated attacks and "pile-ons".
Other players were targeted by large volumes of abuse after a "trigger", even though they received relatively fewtweets.
In November of last year, Clark was sent off for a violation of the game's rules, and he received a lot of abuse on this day.
Crystal Palace's James McArthur was the subject of abuse after getting a yellow card for stepping on a player.
There is a chance that a spike took place when Kurt Zouma kicked and slapped his cat after the data was collected.
As part of its preparation to regulate tech giants under new online safety laws, Ofcom collaborated with the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.
A new machine-learning technology was created by the study and a team of experts manually looked at a random sample of 3,000 social media posts.
A majority of the sample were positive towards players. The others were abusive.
The machine-learning tool analysed 2.3 million social media posts.
According to the report, footballers are subjected to vile abuse on social media.
It is difficult to tackle online abuse. To make sure that players can do their job without being subjected to abuse, more must be done.
New laws will be introduced in the UK to make online users safer, while preserving freedom of expression, with rules for sites and apps.
"Social media firms don't need to wait for new laws to make their sites and apps safe for users," said Ofcom's Bakhurst.
Tech companies will have to be open about the steps they are taking to protect users when we become the regulators for online safety. They will be expected to design their services in a safe way.
The supporters can help protect the game they love. As the new season begins, we're asking online fans to report abusive posts whenever they see them, because our research shows the vast majority of online fans behave in a responsible manner.
A number of online abuse and safety features it has implemented to stop such posts reaching individuals is one of the reasons it welcomes such research.
We do not tolerate the abuse or harassment of people on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation.
The report acknowledges that this type of research is only possible because of the open and accessible publicAPI. The range of safeguards we put in place doesn't fully reflect the user experience.
Half of all "violative content" is found by its own processes, according to the company.
European football's governing body pledged to work with social media platforms to tackle online abuse during the European Women's Championship.
Football clubs, players, athletes and a number of sporting bodies undertook a four day boycott of social media in an attempt to tackle abuse and discrimination.
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