Football Conversations: What Twitter Reveals about the 2014 World Cup

DIOGO F. PACHECO; FERNANDO B. DE LIMA-NETO; LUIS G. MOYANO; RONALDO MENEZES

Recife

Workshop; Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Mining; 2015

Congresso da Sociedade Brasileira de Computação

In the last few years, Twitter has been used to understand several real-world events such as political elections, civil conflicts, NFL games, to name a few. Motivated by these many examples we asked ourselves, what does Twitter reveal about the 2014 FIFA World Cup? In this paper we (i) analyze the frequency of tweets to show how support evolves during the tournament, to distinguish traditional teams from underdogs, and to show that we can identify important events during matches. Moreover, (ii) we applied clustering techniques to discover similarities on supporters behavior (tweets) that allowed us to infer countries? supporters worldwide. Lastly, (iii) for each match we created cartograms to express the volume and the level of polarization of supporters