Comparing American soccer dialogues: social media commentary Surrounding the 2014 US men’s and 2015 US women’s World Cup teams

Abstract

Mega sporting events such as the World Cup have been found to stimulate categorization of in-groups and out-groups among fans. While self-categorization correlates with gender, the sport of soccer also facilitates nationalistic categorization. The World Cup features nation vs. nation competition while making gender a non-variable as the men and women compete in separate tournaments in separate years. This study examined 33,529 tweets illustrating social media match commentary involving US teams and opponents on Twitter during the 2014 and 2015 World Cups. Results revealed US teams were more likely to be described in regard to attributions of success and failure, while opposition teams were more likely to receive personal and physical attributions. Conversely, no differences were found between US Men’s and Women’s teams in regard to characterizations of success and failure, but revealed the Women’s team was more likely to receive personal and physical characterizations.