Real-time analysis for European football clubs and players

Brandtix, a London-based sports technology organization that provides real-time player indexing, has partnered with a text analytics company to enable sport businesses to better understand the feelings of fans.

Brandtix chose Lexalytics text analytics because it combines advanced machine learning techniques and natural language processing, allowing contextual processing to determine sports-specific sentiment analysis, according to Lexalytics. The Brandtix platform uses more than 100 different metrics to analyze athletes’ sports performance, social media activity and fan sentiment in real time.

Social media in European football has gained traction. For example, player Cristiano Ronaldo’s social media followers total 215 million across the major platforms of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. He is reportedly mentioned 19,000 times a day on average.

Jon Rosenblatt, CEO of Brandtix, says, “Our purpose is to give football clubs and players a specific and real-time value based on playing performance and off-field digital activity—namely social media and digital reach, alongside fan sentiment. Our platform provides a one-stop shop for holistic insights into player and team values, doing so in real time. The partnership with Lexalytics is a significant one, as fan sentiment analysis forms part of our data to give our platform a key differential.”

Brandtix has taken Lexalytics insights and combined it with its own data science, proprietary algorithms, natural language processing and domain knowledge, extracted from hundreds of diverse data points across 19 languages to create a social sentiment intelligence engine, according to Lexalytics.

Jeff Catlin, CEO of Lexalytics, says, “What’s exciting and unique about this partnership is that the feelings of sports fans—especially football ones—are rife with colloquialisms and therefore a challenge for most text analytics platforms. Our algorithms detect fan vernacular and accurately translate it as positive or negative. Jesse Lingard’s winning strike in the FA Cup final generated a groundswell of social posts describing it by the slang term ‘sick’. We immediately decoded this as a positive connotation of the word.”