Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse

TL;DR

This study analyzes how emotional reactions to football matches influence online discourse on Reddit, revealing that real-world events cause sentiment shifts that spread across communities, impacting language and behavior.

Contribution

It provides a computational analysis of emotional contagion in online communities during football events, highlighting cross-community sentiment transfer and its implications.

Findings

Negative sentiment correlates with problematic language

Match outcomes influence sentiment and posting habits

Sentiment spreads to unrelated communities

Abstract

This paper examines how emotional responses to football matches influence online discourse across digital spaces on Reddit. By analysing millions of posts from dozens of subreddits, it demonstrates that real-world events trigger sentiment shifts that move across communities. It shows that negative sentiment correlates with problematic language; match outcomes directly influence sentiment and posting habits; sentiment can transfer to unrelated communities; and offers insights into the content of this shifting discourse. These findings reveal how digital spaces function not as isolated environments, but as interconnected emotional ecosystems vulnerable to cross-domain contagion triggered by real-world events, contributing to our understanding of the propagation of online toxicity. While football is used as a case-study to computationally measure affective causes and movements, these patterns have implications for understanding online communities broadly.