The much publicised Luis Suarez incident has been at the forefront of news stories worldwide after the Uruguayan striker appeared to bite Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini in a crucial World Cup group game. With FIFA’s verdict relating to the incident due to be released yesterday, a Blurrt campaign was set up to collect all tweets relating to Suarez that also had relation to the incident. At around 14:50, FIFA released it’s decision that he had been given a 9 game international ban, a four month ban from all forms of football and a fine of 100,000 Swiss Francs.
The Blurrt volume graph shows clearly how Twitter erupted as the news was released with tweets shooting up from approximately 200 per minute to a total of just under 5,000 tweets per minute at it’s highest. With such a high volume of tweets relating to such a controversial incident, the sentiment values of the tweets is interesting to dissect. A huge bias towards negativity can be seen with 40% of unique tweets having negative connotations, the retweet percentages back this up with 50% being negative.
Most of the negative tweets are ones that reinforce the ban itself and expressing a sense of disgust towards the player’s actions. However, there are a few tweets from fans of Suarez’s club side Liverpool – these saying how the ban is unfairly hindering the team’s early season form.
don’t understand why Suarez has only been banned for 4 months…should be a lifetime ban in my opinion
— molly (@mollskatic) June 26, 2014
Unbelievable Suarez only got 4 month ban. He shouldn’t play again. — Dom Moass (@DomMoass) June 26, 2014
The biting incident was done in a Uruguay shirt, therefore it should be Uruguay and Suarez who pay the consequences, not Liverpool
— Michael Connell (@ConnellMichael) June 26, 2014