On Sunday July 1, the match between Italy and Spain did not only take place on the green lawn of Kiev ! On Twitter, hundreds of thousands of fans commented the game and produced a huge mass of information. The Pegasus Data Project has collected those tweets for you.

Please discover the result through the following infographic. Comments are situated after the image. (Click on it to expand.)

A gigantic Twitter match

Thanks to Twitter efficient and friendly API’s, we’ve collected 302’165 tweets containing the hashtag #Euro2012 between 8.30 pm and 11pm. During the same interval, player names of the two confronting teams were written 418’389 times.

The Top-12 Players infographic

click to enlarge :

Analysis and trends

What can we observe ?

A scorer gets much attention, and at that same moment, people seem generally to tweet a lot more. This indicates that the excitation in the real-world (at the pub, outside in public space in front of a giant screen, or at home) is translated to the Twitter world.

But… what else ?

Some of the players entering of leaving the field get suddenly mentioned in large proportions (see Torres at ~ 75′ or Motta) at the precise moment when that happens.

In this match, yellow cards don’t provoke much reactions among Twitter users (there were no red cards given).

Mario Balotelli is the most often appearing player in tweets (76’507), since people may have had great expectations from him after his great performance against Germany in the semi-finals. But Fernando Torres could have overtaken his first place, since he only played a quarter of an hour and got mentioned 55’012 times.

Both goalkeepers are cited many times all along the match. In particular, when comparing popularity of Italian players one minute, after the other, it appears that Gianluigi Buffon is the peaking one … three minutes before the match (notice the gap on the spanish side !). It seems that singing the national anthem is an important moment for him. But the other goalkeeper also gets his part : we observe in the infographic some kind of hommage to Iker Casillas superbly parrying shots at 33min and 51min.

720’000 tweets, how is it possible to record such a massive data ?

Twitter proposes two distinct types of APIs (= Application Programming Interface), one (REST) for searching through public tweets among many possibilities, the other (Streaming) intended for obtaining in real-time tweets corresponding to tags, users, keywords, etc.

We use the streaming APIs to record every tweet (ID of the tweet, username, time of creation, content, etc.) owning the keyword #Euro2012, or the name of one of the players of Italian or Spanish teams. Some forthcoming articles are explain it in details in the tutorials section.

Follow us on Twitter to keep in touch !

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Bonus : the complete players flow

click to enlarge :

Want to share this work ?

If you’re interested by using this infographic, please don’t forget to mention us. If you’d like to suggest other uses of these data, please feel free to contact us.

Anyway, the comment section is just waiting for you !