Far beyond the four lines: the Group B fan pages at the 2018 World Cup

Abstract

This paper examines how fans of the national teams of Portugal, Spain, Morocco and Iran, the so-called Group B of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, got involved with their respective official Facebook pages and how the fan pages related to stakeholders. The strategy adopted is based on a quantitative approach to the data flows produced, between 1 April 2017 and 3 May 2018, by fan pages and their users. The sample consists of 3068 posts and close to 11 million interactions on the network. Data were extracted via Facebook Graph API and treated with Gephi software. Results reveal that offline social contexts highlight the opportunities and the involvement bans, in a logic in which football goes far beyond the pitch. This research also allowed to map the relationship between fan pages and their key influencers on a global scale, focussing on the content produced.

Keywords:

• Football World Cup
• stakeholders
• fans
• social network analysis
• Facebook

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.