The Football Association will look into the homophobic tweets Burnley striker Andre Gray posted four years ago after they were shared across social media on the weekend he scored his first Premier League goal, according to multiple reports.
The governing body are reportedly investigating the tweets, which came from the 25-year-old's official account when he was still a non-league player.
Gray, who scored for the Clarets in a 2-0 victory over Liverpool at Turf Moor, apologised in a statement on Saturday night and asked for forgiveness.
One of his messages, posted in January 2012 when he was with the now-defunct Hinckley United, read: "Is it me or are there gays everywhere? #Burn #Die #Makesmesick'"
Last season's Championship player of the year endured a troubled past and has a scar on his face from a knife attack he suffered during gang trouble in the midlands, and though he stressed in his statement that he was a changed man from the one who posted such thoughts on Twitter, the FA are still set to look into his comments.
Should Gray incur either a fine or a ban, he would not be the first professional footballer to be punished for comments made on social media, with ex-England duo Ashley Cole and Rio Ferdinand among those to have landed in hot water for Twitter posts.
In 2015, Robert Huth, then on Stoke's books, was suspended for two games having been found to have been in breach of rules relating to comments which are indecent, improper, or bring the game into disrepute.
And in June of this year, the FA gave Coventry's Chris Stokes a one-match ban for homophobic remarks he posted on Twitter one month earlier.
In the same month that Gray's tweet was posted in 2012, then-Leicester defender Michael Ball was fined £6,000 by the FA for homophobic comments posted on Twitter, while Federico Macheda was fined £15,000 for writing something similar later that year.