Abstract

Professional sports have large fan bases that congregate in online sports fan communities. The sports community is suitable to be a sandbox for studying offline context’s effects on online community behavior. By now, prior works did not present a detailed study on the offline-online connection by examining detailed community discussion content. To fill this gap, this work presents a comprehensive study of online communities’ comments about football (soccer) matches, grounded in the data from Premier League teams’ Reddit online communities during the 2020-2021 season. We propose a metric “gap score” to quantify offline events’ effects by measuring the gap between fans’ prematch expectations and actual match results. Using this metric, we investigated how team performance impacted comments’ sentiment, discussion topics, and the pattern of comments’ votes. The findings highlight the close connection that exists between offline events and online discussions and reveals both theoretical and practical implications for online communities.

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.