After the UEFA European Football Championship and the European Aquatics Championship, we compare the online reputation of popular soccer players and swimmers in Hungary.
In Europe, soccer is so popular among fans that it can sometimes seem like all other sports pale in comparison. This is particularly true in Hungary, where there's been a long-time criticism towards the government that some other sports don’t get the support they deserve, especially since athletes there have much better international results than our soccer players.
Recent months have presented us with plenty of opportunities to observe who wins the popularity contest, as the European Aquatics Championships and the UEFA European Football Championship took place in June and July.
So, we at Neticle decided to investigate and have collected the public online mentions of six Hungarian swimmers and six Hungarian soccer players from the 1st of May to the 15th of July, to compare how they appeared in the online space of the country.
In the chart below, green lines represent the daily number of mentions for different soccer players and blue lines indicate the same for swimmers. At first glance, it becomes clear that soccer players had much more mentions, even if the online buzz around swimmers did increase during the championship (10-23 June).
To put this into further perspective, all swimmers examined here won medals, most of them gold and multiple ones at the aquatic championship, which ended up being Hungary’s most successful participation in history with 31 medals altogether. At the same time, the Hungarian national soccer team did not advance from their group after one win and two losses.
A lot of mentions do not equal a lot of love
There’s more nuance to the situation, however. This chart shows the daily web opinion index, where Neticle Media Intelligence measures how strong negative and positive opinions are about any given topic on a daily basis. It is clear that while talk about soccer players was abundant before and during the UEFA championship, most of the opinions expressed about them were rather negative.
At the same time, swimmers’ reputation was exceptionally positive for almost the entirety of the examined period. Each of the examined swimmers’ closing web opinion indexes were also higher than those of any of the soccer players.
If we look at the ratio of positive, neutral and negative mentions below, it becomes even more clear that swimmers won over online users’ hearts much more than soccer players did. The team captain in particular, Szoboszlai Dominik, had the highest ratio of negative mentions, though he had by far the highest number of mentions overall as well.
It would seem that while lots of people follow and have an opinion about soccer, those opinions aren’t all sunshine and rainbows at all. At the same time, news sites and some social media users definitely do appreciate wonderful results in other sports as well: those people just aren’t as loud and as many.
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