Roy Hodgson’s choice of squad for this summer’s World Cup has been discussed thoroughly by fans and pundits the country over. One of the most interesting points raised regularly is Hodgson’s apparent inclination towards players plying their trade in the city of Liverpool. Six players from Liverpool FC and three from Everton FC included in his 23 man squad – over a third of the England squad. Of these nine Merseyside players, a staggering seven started the team’s second game of the tournament against Uruguay.
Using Blurrt’s Twitter sentiment analysis tool, the search terms ‘Liverpool’ and ‘Everton’ were used separately in order to discover what the Twitter community think of Hodgson’s team selection. The search takes place between 20:00 and 20:30 GMT – the first half an hour of the game. This is to try and get tweets regarding team selection rather than changes made during the game.
Liverpool:
Using the search term ‘Liverpool’ and the time period specified above, 741 tweets were collected. These tweets were all of a very positive nature. 410 unique tweets were written – 37% of which were positive, whilst only 10% were negative and the remaining 53% neutral. 331 retweets were posted – 54% being positive, a tiny 5% negative and 41% neutral. The sentiment graph shows just how positive the tweets were with a consistently high score.
Everton:
When searching with ‘Everton’ – although there are significantly less tweets – the positivity continues. Only 31 unique tweets were posted in the specified time period, with 47% of them being positive, 13% negative and 40% neutral. 14 retweets were made showing a very significant amount of 79% positive, just 7% negative and 14% neutral.
Hodgson’s apparent favour towards Merseyside based players seems to have been received well in general, however, it will be interesting to see if this positivity continues if the team do not progress and find themselves boarding a premature flight back to England.