The footballing world has been left in shock on Friday by the news Ugo Ehiogu has died aged 44.

The former Middlesbrough and Aston Villa defender was a coach of Tottenham's U23 side and collapsed at their training ground on Thursday after suffering a heart attack.

Sadly, Ehiogu passed away in the early hours of the following morning and tributes have flooded social media since Spurs announced the shocking news.

As well as making over 400 career appearances, Ehiogu also picked up four caps for England.

In fact, the ex-central defender scored in Sven-Goran Eriksson's first game in charge in a 3-0 win over Spain.

“I will always remember him as an extremely good professional, a very, very nice man,” Eriksson told Newsweek.

“It came as a shock for me to see he had died at 44 years old. It is sad for everyone. For sure, he will be remembered by all England football fans.”

Unfortunately, not all of the immediate reaction to Ehiogu's death has been well received, though.

The BBC were forced to delete a tweet that was accused of being disrespectful by various users on Twitter.

Shortly after the heartbreaking news was announced, BBC Sport's official account bizarrely tweeted a picture of the former England international's statistics from old video game Championship Manager 2.

The tweet read: "Just look at Ugo Ehiogu's stats on Championship Manager 2...

"What a career the ex-Aston Villa man had."

So you can understand why it received such a tirade of abuse.

It didn't take too long for the social media gurus at the BBC to see the error of their ways and remove the tweet.

Not before some canny people over at the Daily Mail had grabbed a screenshot of some of the replies it had received, though.

Safe to say, we don't think they will be making that mistake again.