Sky Sports News and Team of the Week

Here at Blurrt we capture all mentions of Premier League footballers over the past weekend’s games, to put together our Social Team of the Week, which you often see being used on Sky Sports News - and trust us when we say, it’s a lot of data!

The ratings we give players are calculated using the Blurrt Score, a unique metric that measures audience reaction by analysing and understanding sentiment expressed in social media posts using our own natural language processing system, as well as factoring in the volumes of conversation going on.

This means that if something particularly significant and reactive happens, for instance let’s say that Liverpool throw away a 3-1 lead to underdogs Bournemouth who score a 93rd minute goal to win 4-3… In this instance you would see the rating for that goalscorer rocket upwards as the footballing world reacts to that unexpected occurrence.

But it’s important to remember that the Blurrt Score isn’t a rating that reflects athletic performance and accomplishment, instead it’s all about social reaction, be that good or bad, as well as volumes of conversation.

This means that the majority of the time we use the Blurrt Score to select a ‘team of the week’, we will still have those players who have had a great game in the starting 11 thanks to those football fans who take to social to recognise the effort, ability and contribution that’s been put in – and that, in turn, means that you will see Blurrt share similar choices to the opinion of well-respected pundits.

BUT the fact we’re all about reactions, emotion and passion means that we will have some inclusions in our 11 who have made their way into the side with one-off ‘special’ moments.

A wonder save, a goal of the season contender or a last minute winner is likely to see a player make that team of the week as it’s those moments we love to react to and talk about on social media.

The Blurrt Score Continued…Or how Nathan Aké actually scored 9.8

As explained, the Blurrt Score looks at all positive, negative and neutral conversations as well as the strength of reactions expressed and the overall volume of conversation.

It’s predominantly those three different elements with some clever maths thrown in, that we use to calculate the final figure within our clever algorithm.

One weekend Nathan Aké was the recipient of a very large volume of tweets with a huge surge in positive emotion-bearing posts, two factors combined that would see a resulting high-end Blurrt Score.

Using our Insights tool, we can look at how the volume of conversation around Aké spiked massively as the goal went in, with 2,132 tweets posted in a 60 second period between 15:23 and 15:24.

Nathan Aké Conversation Volume Graph

We can also use Insights to see how emotion-bearing posts that mentioned Aké increased as a part of that spike in volume, with the use of stronger positive emotional reactions also increasing.

Volume of emotion-bearing conversation on Nathan Aké

As you can see, there was a huge increase in positive tweets that expressed happiness and love as that goal went in, and rightfully so with Bournemouth’s manager Eddie Howe delivering an emotional post-match interview saying:

“For this club and everyone involved, it’s made for a very special day.

These days are huge for us.”

Well here’s to hoping that we can enjoy plenty more of these ‘huge days’ in football soon as they always make for great talking points within Blurrt’s Super Social Team of the Week.