Twitter beats the odds for football predictions

Twitter is better than the bookies’ odds at predicting the football results after kick-off, a study has found.

Researchers from the University of East Anglia’s school of economics and the University of Reading analysed 13.8million tweets – an average of 5.2 per second – during the 2013-14 Premier League season, as well as in-play betting prices from Betfair, the online gambling company.

They found that, if the combined tone of supporter tweets at any given second during a match was positive, the favoured team was more likely to win than the betting odds implied.

The findings are published in the journal Economic Inquiry.