Sweet FA: Sentiment, Swearing and Soccer

The sentiments expressed by football fans in the stories that they tell are often intensified by the use of swear words. Football provides a useful test bed for sentiment analysis due to the symmetric nature of events in matches: what is good for one team is bad for the other. We can relate social media messages to the narrative that fans of a given team might be expected to construct. We use these features of football-related tweets to investigate some common assumptions about swearing as a sentiment marker on social networks. The results demonstrate that swearing and other sentiment markers depend heavily on context, and that understanding this context is essential if sentiment is to be detected faithfully. We also show that swearing is not always indicative of negative sentiment. Please note that strong language is used throughout this