Professional sports has evolved from a game to an organization that has been codified, strategized, and commercialized. One factor that is shaping the sports industry is the pervasiveness of social media. On the one hand, social media is used as a powerful medium for distributing and getting news, engaging in topical discussions, and empowering brands. On the other hand, social media has become a crucial mouthpiece for athletes to interact with peers, share opinions, thoughts, and feelings. However, millions of followers, tweets, and likes later, researchers, practitioners, and athletes alike ask whether social media has an impact on an athlete's performance. We conducted a social media usage and a sentiment analysis of 124,341 Twitter tweets extracted from 31 tennis athletes. We linked these data to 8,095 corresponding match day performances. The results show that high social media usage has a significant negative impact on athletes' performance.
With thousands of (online) bookmakers accepting wagers on sporting events, sports betting has become a billion-dollar business worldwide. Therefore, researchers and practitioners have gathered interest in investigating the "wisdom-of-crowds" effect in online tipster communities to predict the outcomes of sports events. We extracted 1,534,041 tips of 3,484 tipsters from Blogabet.com and used this user-generated content to investigate whether there is wisdom in online tipster communities that can be used to improve betting returns. We applied state-ofthe-art data mining and natural language processing techniques and tested our hypotheses using quantitative research methods. Our results demonstrate that there is indeed wisdom in such online tipster communities that can improve sports betting returns. Tipsters won 3.29% more tips than the implied win probability set by bookmakers and produced averaged yields of 3.97%. We further identified four characteristics that are significant indicators for smarter subcrowds within the overall crowd of an online tipster community.
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