ABSTRACT
Post COVID-19 pandemic, sports events and sports activities have been severely affected. The mega sports events were either postponed or held in the absence of live audience. Through this study we investigate the progressive use of social media by fans and other stakeholders to express their support to favorite sports teams, athletes, coaches, sports organizations, sponsors and more during COVID-19. UEFA Euro 2020 was conducted across 12 countries with an intent to show unity and bring normalcy in sports business during the third wave of COVID-19. Hashtag analysis and mention analysis have been performed to find sports teams, athletes or other stakeholders that were directly being discussed about by the fans. We also focused on tweet context annotations that provide entities as pairs of domain and entity collected from tweets’ text. Our results indicated that hashtags and mentions alone cannot substantially justify the popularity of any entity. Thus, from the point of view of identifying any athlete, team, organization or any sponsor as a brand, tweet context annotations can be valuable from the perspective of E-Branding, E-Marketing and E-Commerce. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.