Abstract
In recent years, the rapid expansion of social media has significantly enhanced public engagement with football events, enabling fans to transcend geographical boundaries and form vibrant communities. This digital revolution has also allowed football fans to actively contribute to the content produced by professional media creators, making social media a key platform for sharing opinions and events related to daily life. The immense popularity of football makes it an ideal subject for analysing fan sentiment and comments, particularly on platforms like Facebook. This study focuses on the Bologna FC 1909 football team, especially following their historic qualification in 2023/2024 for the Champions League after a 60-year hiatus. By capturing fans' reactions and emotions to various in-game events such as goals and penalties, the data offers deep insights into the evolving dynamics of fan sentiment as matches progress. Employing topic modelling analysis techniques and thorough sentiment analysis, this research aims to uncover the main themes dominating discussions among Bologna FC fans and to provide a comprehensive view of fan interactions during the recently concluded Serie A championship. Through this analysis, we seek to delineate the broader narrative of fan engagement and emotional investment that underscores significant football events, offering valuable perspectives on the impact of social media in shaping public engagement with football. The Sentiment Analysis consents to describe some impressions about the most commented topics and the relation with some match events. Additionally, people’s moods continually change over time in response to events that affect them. This may be modelled as an evolutionary process of change of state over time. The data collected from Bologna FC and our basic research hypothesis will enable us to propose a model representing the fan group’s sentiment, which evolves and is influenced by the results of matches in the official championship.