Measuring the popularity of football players with Google Trends

Abstract

Google Trends is a valuable tool for measuring popularity since it collects a large amount of information related to Google searches. However, Google Trends has been underused by sports analysts. This research proposes a novel method to calculate several popularity indicators for predicting players’ market value. Google Trends was used to calculate six popularity indicators by requesting information about two football players simultaneously and creating popularity layers to compare players of unequal popularity. In addition, as the main idea is to obtain the popularity indicators of all players on the same scale, a cumulative conversion factor was used to rescale these indicators. The results show that the proposed popularity indicators are essential to predicting a player’s market value. In addition, using the proposed popularity indicators decreases the transfer fee prediction error for three different models that are fitted to the data using the multiple linear regression, random forest, and gradient boosting machine methods. The popularity indicator Min, which is a robust reflection of the popularity that represents a player’s popularity during the periods when they are less popular, is the most important popularity indicator, with a significant effect on the market value. This research provides practical guidance for developing and incorporating the proposed indicators, which could be applied in sports analytics and in any study in which popularity is relevant.

The Military Separated Me; You Cannot Connect Me

“…As a consequence of the effort to find a single, all-inclusive term that refers to all who have had a touchpoint with the US Department of Defense (DoD), the term military-connected has gained popularity in recent years. Utilizing analysis of keyword data from Google web searches between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2023, using Google Trends (GT), the emergence of a new normative identity is evident (Cebrián & Domenech, 2022;Genoe et al, 2021;Lippi et al, 2017;Malagón-Selma et al, 2023). During that time frame and within the education and jobs category of Google, "military-connected" and "veteran" generally trended upwards at about the same rate (see Figure 1).…”