Can Social Media Predict Soccer Clubs’ Stock Prices? The Case of Turkish Teams and Twitter

Abstract

Finance literature in sports focuses on three main methods of stock price prediction in soccer: based on match results, pre-match expectations, or match importance. For pre-match expectations, betting odds is commonly used as the indicator of investors’ sentiments. We propose to include Twitter data as another indicator of this variable, and analyze the links among soccer match results, sentiments, and stock returns of the four major Turkish soccer teams. Our results show that social media can be a strong indicator of pre-match expectations and investors’ sentiments in stock price prediction.