An American football team just had a major fail on Twitter

This is unfortunate.

Yesterday, the New England Patriots were celebrating the exciting(?) fact that they were the first NFL team to reach 1 million followers on Twitter.

So they decided to reward their followers by creating custom avatar jerseys for anyone who retweeted the following tweet.

It has been retweeted more than 8,500 times so it's not hard to imagine that something would slip through the cracks.

And one very unfortunate (and offensive) Twitter handle did.

The tweet was quickly deleted but not before Deadspin managed to get a screenshot of the offending post.

Oops.

The Patriots then tweeted this apology.

Somebody definitely got in loads of trouble.

[H/T: thescore.ie]