Does Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters’ trash-talk go viral?

• Autor(a) principal: Tereso, Duarte Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/22207
• topic: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA); Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC); Fandom; Trash-talk; Sentiment analysis; Fighting events; Artes Marciais Mistas (MMA); Análise de sentimentos; Desportos de combate

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and, more specifically, the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization (UFC), have been experiencing exponential growth. In recent years, there have been some differences in what fans want to see, having fights with a lot of drama between the fighters generates large numbers of pay per view compared to fights between highly technical and dominant fighters, even if they are title fights. The purpose of our study is to understand if trash-talk between the fighters before the fight tends to attract more fans to the sport and what kind of sentiments does it generate in them. We extracted tweets from fans and answers from fighters and cross these data. We found that fights involving a lot of drama between the fighters are the ones that have the biggest pay per view numbers, 2 of them generating 2.5 times more pay per view than 7 fights between lower profile fighters. However, we did not find a direct influence of each fighter’s negative expressions used during the conference and the fans’ tweets but, we did find that the context of the event in itself plays a more significant role as the rivalry between fighters is expressed during the press conference. Regarding the engagement of fans’, while we found no evidence of a cause-effect relationship with the negative sentiment of the fighters, we confirmed that higher levels of profanity speech are associated with higher engagement, both on pay-per-view and on the number of tweets.