The Social Identity of Naturalized Footballers in China:Social Media Contents Based Sentiment and Thematic Analysis

The paper explores the social identity of naturalized footballers in China by analyzing replies extracted from the relevant trending topics on Weibo in a diachronic manner. A mixed-method examination of these replies through manually annotated sentiment analysis and theme extraction reveals that: 1) Sentiments about the social identity of naturalized footballers polarize significantly, among which negative emotions being more intense than positive ones; 2) sentiments toward different players are quite diversified; 3) sentiments change markedly from negative to positive over time; 4)“nation and ancestry”,“acculturation and integration”and“competitive level”are the three most discussed themes of online conversations about naturalized players.