Thursday night marked the start of the 2021 NFL season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beating the Dallas Cowboys 31-29. The anticipation leading up to the season was evident with 1, 224, 084 mentions across all platforms and #NFLKickoff trending on Twitter. Overall sentiment for the keyword “NFL” was positive at 59.1% and fans seemed excited for the start of the season.
“Good”, “love”, and “watch” were all top themes of discussion leading up to the Cowboys and Buccaneers’ debut. The NFL conversation picked up traction in various outlets including mentions from John Cena, CNN, the New York Times, Ed Sheeran, and ESPN. Most of the discussion was through Twitter.
Upon the Cowboy’s loss, there was a significant spike in negative responses using the #cowboys in Fort Worth, Austin, Dallas, and other Texan cities during the game last night. In contrast, positive sentiments were recorded for #buccaneers and #tombrady. Since the completion of game 1, the discussion has died down across channels. The remaining NFL teams will compete this Sunday, Sept. 12, however, online conversations have yet to pick up for those games.
The #nfl was most frequently used within the last seven days with 203, 419 mentions, #football, #sports were also very popular. In addition to these hashtags, #cryptocurrency, #crypto, and #blockchain all circulated within the last three days. This may have been influenced by the recent move towards cryptocurrency in the NFL. Many players like Sean Culkin, Trevor Lawrence, and Russel Okung are agreeing to be paid by crypto or signing contracts with cryptocurrency companies. During last night’s opening game Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen stared in a commercial advertising the cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX.
However, the league has cautioned its approach placing restrictions on team NTFs, despite their success in other professional sports leagues, like the NBA. As both the league and players push towards integrating cryptocurrency as a regular practice in sports, it will most likely continue to grow and influence discussions around the NFL.
Using the keyword “cryptocurrency and NFL”, the trend of this topic has gradually increased since September 7. Between September 8 to 10, the keyword “cryptocurrency” was strongly correlated with NFL terms including “Tom”, “Brady”, “cowboys”, “tampa”, “buccaneers”, “season”, “nfl” and “game”. The sentiment at this time was also majority positive. Overall, it seems that both Brady, the Buccaneers’ and cryptocurrency walked away with a win on Thursday.
