The Impact of COVID-19 on Sport in Twitter: A Quantitative and Qualitative Content Analysis

Abstract

The spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has transformed many aspects of people’s daily life, including sports. Social networks have been flooded on these issues. The present study aims to analyze the tweets produced relating to sports and COVID-19. From the end of January to the beginning of May 2020, over 4,000,000 tweets on this subject were downloaded through the Twitter search API. Once the duplicates, replicas, and retweets were removed, 119,253 original tweets were analyzed. A quantitative–qualitative content analysis was used to study the selected tweets. Posts dynamics regarding sport and exercise evolved according to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown, shifting from considering sport as a healthy bastion to an activity exposed to disease like any other. Most media professional sporting events received great attention on Twitter, while grassroots and women’s sport were relegated to a residual role. The analysis of the 30 topics identified focused on the social, sporting, economic and health impact of the pandemic on the sport. Sporting cancellations, leisure time and socialization disruptions, club bankruptcies, sports training and athletes’ uncertain career development were the main concerns. Although general health measures appeared in the tweets analyzed, those addressed to sports practice were relatively scarce. Finally, this study shows the importance of Twitter as a means of conveying social attitudes towards sports and COVID-19 and its potential to generate alternative responses in future stages of the pandemic.

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“…In this case, the words nationalpark, nationalparks, nationalparke and nationalparken were removed to avoid distorting the results. Once the bag of words was ready, establishing the number of topics needed was the first step to ensure good cohesion in the resulting topics (González et al 2021). After fixing the number at 30, a further calculation was used to select the most representative tweets on each topic.…”

Social Sensing and Individual Brands in Sports: Lessons Learned from English-Language Reactions on Twitter to Pau Gasol’s Retirement Announcement

“…In this regard, word frequency, number of mentions, and number of retweets are of high interest. Qualitative analysis is usually performed through content analysis [11], which makes it possible to study the meaning of the messages. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods has been identified by some authors as a useful complementary research technique, since it allows a combination of technical capabilities of analysis with in-depth qualitative research methods [12].…”

LDA-based topic modeling for COVID-19-related sports research trends

“…However, most previous COVID-19-related studies of sports have only analyzed either newspapers or social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook ( González et al, 2021 ; Naraine and Bakhsh, 2022 ). Although many studies focus on problems in sports caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, few have used bibliographic analysis.…”