Sports Fans Behavior on Twitter: A Big Data Analysis of Sentiments in the 2018 World Cup Final

The purpose of the present study is to determine the words that came to the forefront of social media posts by fans for the 2018 World Cup Final, the most frequently used expressions, and the emotional tendencies of the fans. For this purpose, 56,877 tweets written in English on Twitter on the 2018 World Cup Final were extracted by the “R-Project” software and analyzed. According to the analysis results, it was concluded that a total of twenty positive statements were used with the highest frequency by fans, and it was also determined that the positive emotional trend was dominant compared to the negative trend, irrespective of what the result of the match was. In conclusion, it may be claimed that the perceptions and reactions of the fans regarding the World Cup Final are different from club matches at national level, and that mostly positive emotions came to the forefront