Tweets Can Help Predict Football Match Results When Combined With Betting Prices

Are you a football fan? Are you a social media enthusiast and more-so do you engage in sports betting?  You’re in the right place because research has found that technologically they are all linked together and can work hand in hand.

Activities on Twitter can predict when a team is more likely to win a soccer match or when soccer bets are mispriced, researchers from the university of East Anglia-UEA in in UK according to their research published in the economics journal that the team examined 1.38 million tweets that is an average of 5.2 tweets per second–during an English premier league (EPL) season.

The figures were compared with the in-play betting prices available and at the same time on online betting exchange bet the most.

Their research also found that if the combined sequence and tone of tweets in a particular time second was positive–according to measurements by a micro blogging dictionary– then the team was more likely to emerge winner than the betting market prices indicated.

Tweets were particularly significant in the aftermath of goals and referee sanctions, suggesting that the assessment of new information, its significance and the role social media plays to assess cannot be over emphasized.

Many agencies and firms use social media platforms as a tool for forecasting and deliberate denoting of mass opinions, but the researchers end game is to find out how accurate and useful it actually is. The aggregate tone of all tweets for each team was measures, in each passing second of 372 matches that took place during 2013/2014 season. “We find that Twitter activity predicts match outcomes, after controlling for betting market prices” said Alasdair Brown of UEA’s school of economics.

The researchers who embarked on conducting a number of betting strategies in order to quantify the degree of mispricing that social media predicts in a statement said “Much of the predictive power of social media presents itself just after significant market events, such as goals and red cards, where the tone of tweets can help in the interpretation of information. In short, social media activity does not just represent sentiment or misinformation. If sensibly aggregated it can, when combined with a prediction market, help to improve forecast accuracy,” For instance if a better uses conversation estimates of the common paid to Betfair, and betting strategy when tweets on a football team are positive, he could have earned an average return of 2.28 % from 903,821 bets. In contrast to average returns of 5.41% across the matches studied, this comparisons are favourably amazing.