Scots booed as rest of UK and Ireland got behind England at World Cup
Posted on behalf of: University of Sussex
Last updated: Wednesday, 25 June 2014
Twitter users in Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and even France cheered on England at this summer’s World Cup, according to analysis by a Sussex PhD student.
The Scots, however, took to the popular social networking site to, virtually, ‘boo’ from the sidelines when England were playing.
Simon Wibberley, from Informatics, has developed software that can analyse posts on social media to see what people think about a certain issue. Over the past fortnight, he has been investigating whether there is any truth in the old adage that the Scots support anyone but England during international football tournaments.
He processed nearly half a million tweets posted during England’s three matches and has published the results in a post on The Conversation website.
He found that, among tweeters in Scotland, there were 1.3 boos for every cheer when England were playing.
The rest of the UK and Ireland was much more supportive, however, with a ‘boo-to-cheer ratio’ of 1.4 to one in favour of England. There were also big cheers from France, where the tweets were 1.6 to one in favour of the Three Lions.
The results are not conclusive, however, with support or opposition for England changing dramatically as the team’s fate worsened.
During the first game, against Italy, of the UK and Ireland, only the Welsh wanted England to win, with 1.5 cheers for every boo. The majority of tweeters in Scotland, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland backed Italy.
However, with England on the brink of elimination during the Uruguay game, the whole of the British Isles got behind the England team: support from Wales and Northern Ireland rose to 2.5 to one in favour, Ireland swung to two to one and even Scotland tilted to 1.3 to one in favour.
England lost both those games and went into their third and final game, against Costa Rica yesterday (Tuesday 24 June), unable to qualify for the next round, and therefore already mathematically ‘out’ of the tournament before kick off.
With nothing to play for, Twitter was noticeably quieter, with only 61,000 tweets sent during that match, compared with 217,000 and 185,000 in the first two. There were also some surprising results: Northern Ireland out-cheered even England, with 14 tweets to one in favour. Wales was more than four to one in favour and Ireland remained at two to one. Most surprisingly, the Scots cheered five to one in favour of their neighbours to the south.
Simon explains: “The Scots were certainly less keen on England victory than any other part of the British Isles. To this extent, the old maxim is true.
“Yet nor did the Scots want England to be eliminated by Uruguay, even if they cared less than the other home nations.
“And once this came to pass, they definitely didn’t want Britain’s only representatives to go home empty-handed. Alas it made no difference. Yesterday’s 0-0 result meant it happened anyway.”
Simon is part of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM), which is a collaboration between the University of Sussex and Demos.
Their software has recently been used to determine who ‘won’ between politicians Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage in their EU debate this April, and to analyse online misogyny.