Australian and New Zealand sport relationships on Twitter

This entry was posted by on Saturday, 4 June, 2011 at

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with some one at UCNISS about relationships between people and how these relationships, in sports, be almost predictive in terms of helping to determine sport performance.  Who coached a player?  Are their nodes of really good players that can be traced back to certain practices and coaches and cultures that could help explain why a team, much further down the chain, does well?  I don’t really have the data on that from a performance perspective.  What I do have is data regarding athlete and team follower patterns.  My most recent data, and I’m busy updating that now for the future, comes from late December 2010/early January 2011. This was a list of about 300 twitter accounts with the full list of accounts looked at being found on this post.  To analyse relationships, I took the list of twitter accounts, searched through every file that had an account on that list’s complete list of followed, removed all names that followed the account that were not on the list of Twitter followers.  Each occurrence was then put on a separate line. For example @harry_o, AFL, Collingwood -> @stkildafc, AFL, St. Kilda Saints could be a line.  I then created a chart using nodeXL. This was a complete mess because there were over 19,000 follows: Australian sport accounts follow other Australian sport accounts and they follow them a lot.  To make a better, more potentially meaningful chart, I eliminated the individual accounts as the means of looking at relationships and instead used the leagues.  This resulted in the chart below.

 

 

A line node map of Australian sports on Twitter

The red lines that you see are all extending from the AFL node: AFL accounts are following or are being followed by accounts from many Australian sporting competitions.  This chart doesn’t really give an idea of the weight so the table below shows the number of lines and the size of each node by looking at the league (consisting of the combined total of all accounts associated with it) and the followed (combined) that follow an account related to that league.  Why does this matter?  Example: More AFL related accounts follow a Cricket Australia related account than Cricket Australia people are following AFL related accounts.  I’d guess this is the Shane Warne effect.  I’m only including the top 105 connections, where there are 20 or more lines for a particular intersection.  The whole thing has 697 pairings, with 1 share pairings for things like Netball Victoria -> Horse racing.

Account Follows Connections
AFL AFL 5343
NRL NRL 1651
General Australian sport AFL 1462
Cricket Australia Cricket Australia 689
NBL NBL 511
General Australian sport NRL 419
A-League A-League 385
AFL Cricket Australia 379
General Australian sport Cricket Australia 292
AFL NRL 278
AFL ANZ Championship 255
Super Rugby Super Rugby 205
Super Rugby Rugby World Cup 195
ANZ Championship ANZ Championship 187
Swimming Australia Swimming Australia 163
AFL A-League 144
Triathlon Australia Triathlon Australia 139
General Australian sport General Australian sport 138
AFL NBL 137
AFL VFL 121
Cricket Australia NRL 119
Super Rugby NRL 114
ANZ Championship Netball Australia 112
General Australian sport A-League 111
Cycling Australia Cycling Australia 107
AFL Swimming Australia 103
A-League World Cup Soccer 98
Rugby World Cup Rugby World Cup 91
NBL General Australian sport 87
AFL Northern Football League 83
NRL Rugby League World Cup 82
AFL Australian Olympic Committee 78
Australian Baseball League AFL 73
AFL United States Australian Football League 72
AFL Basketball Australia 72
NBL Basketball Australia 70
AFL AFL Canberra 65
AFL AFL U18 National Championships 63
General Australian sport Super Rugby 62
NBL Australian Olympic Committee 61
AFL Hockey Australia 61
NRL Country Rugby League 60
General Australian sport ANZ Championship 59
AFL AFL Canada 56
AFL Mornington Peninsula Nepean Football League 55
Athletics Australia Athletics Australia 54
Cycling Australia General Australian sport 52
AFL Netball Australia 51
Tennis Australia Tennis Australia 50
Rugby World Cup NRL 49
A-League W-League 47
NRL NSW Touch Association 46
Cricket Australia Australian Olympic Committee 45
General Australian sport Swimming Australia 45
AIHL AIHL 44
NRL Rugby League/State of Origin 44
General Australian sport World Cup Soccer 42
AIS Swimming Australia 41
NBL NRL 41
ANZ Championship Australian Olympic Committee 40
Super Rugby Swimming Australia 37
Cricket Australia ANZ Championship 36
Swimming Australia NRL 35
AFL Athletics Australia 34
AFL Association of Surfing Professionals 34
General Australian sport Horse racing 33
AFL SANFL 33
General Australian sport Rugby World Cup 33
AFL Super Rugby 33
NRL Association of Surfing Professionals 33
A-League Football Federation Australia 32
NRL AIHL 32
AFL SFL 31
AFL Horse racing 31
AFL AFLNT 30
AFL World Cup Soccer 30
Super Rugby General New Zealand sport 30
NBL General New Zealand sport 29
AFL U18 National Championships AFL U18 National Championships 29
General Australian sport Athletics Australia 27
NRL Mens and Mixed NSW Netball Assoc 27
Swimming Australia Triathlon Australia 27
Swimming Australia Cricket Australia 27
Cricket Australia Northern Football League 26
NBL ANZ Championship 26
NRL ANZ Championship 26
General New Zealand sport General New Zealand sport 25
Australian Baseball League Australian Baseball League 23
General Australian sport AIS 23
Cycling Australia Australian Olympic Committee 23
NBL WNBL 22
General New Zealand sport NRL 22
Cycling Australia Triathlon Australia 22
NRL Sydney League 22
AFL Cycling Australia 21
AIHL AWIHL 21
ANZ Championship AIS 21
Super Rugby Cricket Australia 21
Rugby World Cup General New Zealand sport 21
VFL General Australian sport 21
Cricket Australia Hockey Australia 21
A-League NRL 21
A-League NSW Premier League 21
Australian Baseball League Australian Baseball 20
NRL Horse racing 20

I’m not entirely certain what this tells you. For me, it shows that like accounts follow like accounts. An account about the AFL is more likely to follow other AFL accounts than other leagues. It also shows that Australian sport on Twitter is very interconnected. For the major sports, there do not appear to be huge pockets of isolation away from other sports with the major expectation possibly being the AFL.

There might be something going on with the AFL. The NRL has issues in that AFL does not appear anywhere on its follow list. I don’t know where or why this is. There are NRL accounts that follow the VFL. The ANZ Championship doesn’t appear to be following the AFL either. Sport people following the AFL appear to be baseball players, tennis players and skateboarders. Confused.

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