Can you map a football match using Twitter? Last week we ran several experiments to see if that makes sense. The first successful run was the match between Ajax – Real Madrid, in which the reserves of Madrid won with 0-3 and Ajax was deemed to play in the Europa Cup instead of Lyon, who celebrated a bizar victory over Zagreb.
During the whole match we downloaded all the tweets in which the hashtag #ajarea was used and extracted the posting times. We must note that as we only took the hashtag #ajarea into account, so there is serious selection bias here. We don’t want to pretend we have all the tweets about the match, it’s just a sample and definetly not everybody who talks about the match uses the hashtag every time.
After downloading the tweets we could visualize, minute after minute, the amount of tweets that mentioned the hashtag. As you would expect, the important events during the match like goals and disallowed goals are clearly visible in the graph. Probably also news from the other important match in Zagreb had some impact on the amount of tweets on #ajarea, especially in the second half when Lyon started scoring.
Some delay may occur between an actual event and tweets in the above graph. Eerste helft = first half, Tweede helft = second half. Doelpunt afgekeurd = disallowed goal. Sulejmani op de lat = Sulejmani hits the bar.
Graphs like these are like a thermometer for football matches, showing the events that evoked most response in the Twittersphere. Any ideas for further research using Twitter? Let us know in the comments.
Data gathered by Martijn Weghorst.
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