Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on E-participation of Fans in Sports Events

ABSTRACT

Sports watching both through offline as well as online mode has always been fancied by the sports lovers. We investigate the explicit use of social media by sports enthusiasts to show their support and solidarity for their favorite sports team or a particular sportsperson virtually i.e., via e-participation. For experimentation, we have considered the fourth Test match played between India versus Australia from 15–19 January, 2021 during Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2020–2021. During these five days period, a total of 69,965 tweets on Twitter were collected by us favoring both teams. Various statistical techniques coupled with social media analytics such as polarity and emotion analysis have been applied on the collected data to get valuable insights for our results. Our experimental results unambiguously indicate that sports enthusiast globally is using social media as important alternate media to show their support towards their favorite sports team virtually, via e-participation. The emergence and amalgamation of social media and marketing has provided newer horizons to various stakeholders i.e., both viewers and broadcasters to maximize e-participation. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.