In a football (soccer) tournament, it is all about goals. Goals decide the matches, and make the crowd go wild. However, not every goal has equal impact, both in the match and on the fans.
With Twitter we can gauge the excitement caused by each goal during #EURO2016 by looking at the spikes in Tweet volume after each goal. The greater the spike, the more reaction it inspired among fans. This visualization shows every goal of EURO, when it happened, who scored it, how it affected the score, and the corresponding reaction on Twitter.
We used peak detection algorithm to detect spikes and snap goals to the closest spikes. There are many ways we can measure “excitement”. Using raw number of Tweets could be one way, but we chose to normalized the data such that each goal is measured as a percentage of total Tweets in that game, in order to make the goals comparable across the entire tournament. Otherwise, any goal in later matches will easily beat the group stage goals, as those matches attract many more viewers. However, using percentage overcompensated for the matches with fewer viewers so we had to add another weight to adjust the value based on total volume in a match.
The excitement level of a goal can be due to many factors, as you’ll see in the viz:
Here are some ways you can navigate the viz:
Visit https://interactive.twitter.com/euro2016/ and explore the viz for yourself.