Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Porto vs Benfica. Uma cartografia entre o amor e o ódio no Twitter

2020; University of Beira Interior; Issue: 30 Linguagem: Inglês

1646-4974

Branco Di Fátima, Célia Gouveia, Tiago Lapa,

Media and Communication Studies

Sports communication nowadays reaches new social domains considering social network sites. It shapes club cosmovisions, narratives and beliefs. It serves as a carrier in which supporter communities participate in the promulgation, production, consumption and organization of events. Using as case study the football match between FC Porto and SL Benfica, counting for the 13th matchday of Liga NOS, the article aims to identify the influencers of the match on Twitter, the geographical scope of the conversations, the periods of higher flow of the messages and the semantic narrative of four different communities or cliques that have formed around the match. The data collection occurred between 8pm and midnight on December 1st, 2017, which allowed to include in the analysis the anticipation and the aftermath of the match, and resulted in a dataset with 301,451 messages, created by 124,459 profiles, associated with the hashtags #FCPSLB, #FCPorto and #SLBenfica. To understand the data, we used Social Network Analysis. The results point to the club supporter as the major influencer of the network, decentralizing and challenging the control of external communication by football clubs, the global scope and mediatization of the event, the battle of the perspectives between supporter communities and the relation of the communicational flows with incidents of the game.