Thread by @dbelcham

Some detail about the social media patterns of @CPLsoccer and @onesoccer in the 7ish days leading up to the CanPL Final. Why did I do this? Because I've accused both of being biased towards Forge and I felt that I could try to quantify that feeling. 1/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer It should be noted that I'm not the only person who has voiced concerns about the appearance of bias by CanPL and OneSoccer. It feels obvious, but it should be quantified. 2/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer How to quantify it was the question. For this thread I've only analyzed tweets, retweets and quote tweets by the @cplsoccer and @onesoccer accounts. I did not look into the personal-professional account of people working for either organization. 3/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer I did, however, include any of their tweets that the two accounts in question retweeted or quote-tweeted. Given a quick look at them, I suspect the results here would be more skewed, not less. 4/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer While looking at the accounts I excluded any tweets that weren't about the CanPL. That means that these numbers exclude all Forge SCL tweets. I also excluded any generic tweets about the Final. 5/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer I, therefor, didn't count tweets about the Final that weren't talking about the game. That would be tweets that just mention when and where stuff. 6/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer In the end the list is of tweets that are about the Final and directly mention teams. There were 14 tweets of the 97 tweets (14.4%) that didn't use @ForgeFCHamilton @Pacificfccpl or #ForgeFC 7/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer @ForgeFCHamilton @Pacificfccpl So there were 97 tweets between Nov 29th and approximately game time on Dec 5th. 39 of those were by @onesoccer, 58 were by @cplsoccer. 8/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer @ForgeFCHamilton @Pacificfccpl Probably the biggest thing that jumped out at me while compiling the data was that neither @onesoccer nor @cplsoccer retweeted anything produced by the @Pacificfccpl media team. 9/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer It was so clearly missing that I had to check to see if Pacific had any media content during that period. Of course they did. It's just that the two main media avenues for the league chose to completely ignore Pacific FC 10/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer That alone is a huge bias problem by both organizations. Both team's content should get attention if both teams are producing it. In this case they were. 11/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer So if Pacific had none of their content featured, what about Forge? Well @cplsoccer retweeted them 5 times and @onesoccer retweeted them 3 times. 8% of the Finals related tweets pushed by the League and OneSoccer were crafted by Forge 12/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer At first that number seemed low to me, but it really isn't. Approximately 10% of the content about the Final that was pushed to the 47,433 followers of the League and OS accounts was directly from one of the two teams while the other team got 0% 13/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer Remember, this is leading up to the Final. A game that the League should be pushing content about both teams playing in it. But they didn't, and it's worse than 10% v 0% 14/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer Of the 97 tweets I collected, 26 of them linked to the socials of both Forge and Pacific. So about 27% were balanced in their link and, for the most part, their commentary and content. That does mean that 73% weren't though. 15/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer So how many of the remaining 73% of the tweets solely mentioned one club? Pacific had 18 tweets made or retweeted that were solely about them from *both* the League and OneSoccer. That's 18.5% of all the tweets in the week. 16/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer Of those 18 tweets, only 5 were made by OneSoccer. 5 of their 39 tweets mentioned Pacific by themselves. 12.8%. Think about that. This is a team/game where the 2x defending champs could be knocked off. An underdog story not written it seems 17/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer Forge, on the other hand, had 53 of the 97 tweets I collected where they, and they alone, were the account mentioned in it. 54.6% of all those tweets. 18/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer Over half (54.6%) of the tweets that @cplsoccer and @onesoccer produced or retweeted were *only* about Forge in the week leading up the the Finals. 19/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer This thread started by talking about perceived bias. It's hard to argue that the numbers say otherwise about @cplsoccer or @onesoccer. That neither account retweeted a single thing from Pacific is, by itself, all the condemnation that is needed 20/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer And then there's the fact that 54.6% of the tweets were solely about Forge compared to 18.5% for Pacific. Forge had 3x the targeted marketing from the League and OneSoccer. That is ridiculous. And biased. 21/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer For reference, here is the Google sheet where I pulled together the tweets. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d… 22/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer So yah, @canpl and @onesoccer are biased towards Forge. I suspect the bias runs much deeper than this. One of my winter projects it going to be to dive deeper into this using more than just tweets. 23/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer @canpl The real proof is going to be in 2022. Will we continue to see this level of bias now that there is a new champion? I hope not, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it. 24/24

@CPLsoccer @onesoccer @canpl Post script: One Soccer shows a full 3-5 minutes of the Forge post game presser. None of the Pacific one. A 30s spot in the Pacific dressing room is all they get. It continues to the end. 25/24

Some more info coming to light on this last point here. It sounds like there were some technical difficulties surrounding *both* press conferences after the game. While it might have affected Forge's it sounds like it made it impossible to broadcast Pacific's.

Thanks to @DarnelPlanning and @bfque8 for the info you can find starting here.

https://twitter.com/DarnelPlanning/status/1467907869932670984

The Pacific presser exists. Huge thanks to @thiaguitoszwarc for pointing it out

https://twitter.com/thiaguitoszwarc/status/1467931887243038728