Date of Award

Spring 6-5-2024

Document Type

Thesis (Undergraduate)

Department

Quantitative Social Science

First Advisor

Herbert Chang

Second Advisor

Michael Herron

Third Advisor

Feng Fu

Abstract

Since the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, many celebrities have spoken out about the influence social media has on their mental health. Among the most vocal have been professional athletes, who have highlighted the hateful comments and direct messages they receive from fans on social media platforms. In some cases, athletes have even chosen to step away from social media to avoid the toxicity of their timeline. Accordingly, researchers have studied the impact social media has on professional athletes’ mental health, in some cases focusing on how social media can negatively impact professional athletes’ athletic performance in games and competitions. However, the majority of this sub-body of research has focused on how athletes’ own social media posts impact their athletic performance. In this study, I examine the impact of fans’ social media posts on athletes’ performance. More specifically, I study 1,249,107 Instagram comments from posts made by professional soccer players during the 2022/2023 English Premier League season, investigating whether or not the sentiment and content of athletes’ comments impacts their match-day performances over the course of the season. To do so, I use webscraping to obtain the Instagram comments from each selected athlete’s post history. I then use sentiment analysis and topic modeling techniques to measure the content of each comment. I aggregate each player’s comments for each pre-match period, and, using both canonical statistics and machine-learning-based regression models, test whether or not these aggregate features predict player performance in target performance metrics. Overall, the results of this testing suggest that sentiment/content scores derived from a player’s Instagram comments do not predict match-day performance; however, future research is needed to confirm these findings.

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