http://www.floatingsheep.org/2013/01/premier-league-teams-on-twitter-or-why.html Premier League teams on Twitter (or why Liverpool wins the league and the Queen might support West Ham) Have you ever wondered where Premier League football teams draw most of their support from? Or what the geography of fandom is? We have too, and set about to better understand how Premiership teams are reflected in Twitter usage across the UK. The Floatingsheep team, with the help of two researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute - Joshua Melville and Scott A. Hale (both of whom did most of the work) - have created a neat interactive map for you to both explore the geography of Twitter mentions of specific teams, and let you explore the patterns of five key rivalries. Click on the screenshot below to be brought to the full interactive map. please log in to view this image The data used include all geotagged tweets mentioning any of the Premiership football teams and their associated hashtags (e.g., #MUFC or #YNWA) that were sent between August 18 and December 19, 2012. We have only included one tweet per user to prevent 'loud' fans from skewing the results. The users were then aggregated to postcode districts in order to see a fairly fine-grained geography of results. The number of fans per district is normalized by the total 'population' of Twitter users based on a 0.25% random sample of all tweets within the UK. What do the data show us, you ask? In Manchester, for instance, there is the oft-repeated stereotype that Manchester City are the 'real' local team, while Manchester United attract support from further afield. Our map doesn't really support that idea though. There are only a few parts of Greater Manchester in which we see significant more tweets mentioning Manchester City than their local rivals. We also, strangely, see more support for Manchester City in Scotland and Merseyside, and more support for Manchester United in Northern Ireland. The Merseyside rivalry (Liverpool vs. Everton) is another interesting one to map. There we see that Liverpool have the slight edge in the postcode that is home to both team's stadiums. However, there is no clear winner in the rest of the region: with most postcodes having a fairly close split between the two teams. Interestingly, many postcodes in Scotland seem to have more mentions of Everton; while many in Northern Ireland have more mentions of Liverpool. We can also zoom into particular postcodes and see which teams are most mentioned there. The academics in Oxford (for some strange reason) mention Manchester City more than any other team. Central Edinburgh (when not focusing on Hearts or Hibs) has more mentions of Everton than any other Club. And the Queen's home of SW1A goes for West Ham. What about maybe the most important question of all. Who wins the league based on total number of Tweets sent from anywhere in the UK? The answer is Liverpool (a team that hasn't won the actual league since 1990). Manchester United are a somewhat distant second, joined by Everton and Tottenham in the Champions League spots. We also find out that Fulham, Swansea, and Wigan are the three teams that get relegated due to their quite abysmal scores. Apparently just not that many people want to tweet about Wigan. There is no doubt that using Tweets as a proxy for fandom is messy and not always reliable. But, the data do give us a rough sense of who is interested in (or at least talking about what), and where they are doing it from. It allows to begin to counter myths (e.g. that Mancunians don't support Manchester United), develop new insights about places that we don't necessarily have good data about, and most importantly, have some guesses as to which team the Queen might support.
No surprise regarding NI. It's basically 40% United, 40% Liverpool, 10% Arsenal then others. I live with 4 Liverpool supporters and one very rare toffee. I know a total of two Everton supporters, two Spurs fans and two Leeds fans, also.
My initial guess would be that this type of analysis will be heavily skewed by students (likely to be twitter users and likely to move for university). For example, if Man Utd appears popular in Manchester, how much of that could be due to "glory hunters" attending Manchester University? Another possible error is away fans - the most loyal of all supporters who by defintion will not be tweeting from their own postcodes.
I can't be arsed to read all that, how do they judge who someone supports...? I didn't put that I supported LFC when i signed up for twitter, didn't have an option to either.
it's about who you tweet about. I assume they got the information by counting the amount of times @LIVERPOOLFC or #LFC & #YNWA were used
Haha glory supporters attending Manchester uni.. Amazing astro that is singularly the most ridiculous comment ever. I like gerrez couldn't really be arsed to read it all.
Interesting hypothesis. So is that why Liverpool is the most tweeted about club in England? They have the most glory hunting student followers Shows how unscientific the whole thing is - how many people, celebrities etc have tweeted #YNWA as part of the Hillsborough report controversy? And how many of those will actually be Liverpool fans? IIRC #LFC and #MUFC are also used by people making derogatory comments about Liverpool and Suarez in particular, so that's likely to be a big thing skewing the data. Imagine how often ChristianSmith would use #LFC if he was on twitter. Or BBF using #MUFC for that matter...
It's the most inane pastime in a generation. People posting 140 character meaningless ****e about their generally drab lives, that they think others should be interested in & following countless other drips doing the same thing.
That's what I suspected. I have hashtagged various teams depending on who I'm watching at the time so I guess they will have be down as a Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal, Tottenham, Swansea, Newcastle, Man Utd, Man City, etc fan then eh...?
There's pretty good jokes on there, good for summarised news, I don't get to read in depth about the lives of people I don't care about but get the headline instead... There's so many positives!
That would depend on whether you following boring ****s or people that are willing to have a laugh, banter or just generally take the piss etc!
I do amuse myself on Facebook to the most part.. Yesterday we were winding up people arguing about guns.. Was really amusing.. I'd post a link but you'd all know who I actually was then..
Agree with this. People on these things- twitter, faceache,et al., relate the most bland and boring details of their day to day existence as though it's some major philosophical insight. Do they really think anyone cares? OT, this is about as scientific as the Stork theory of childbirth.
