Football 
Horse Racing Which Scottish Football Fans are the Most Vulgar?
The 2021-22 Scottish Premiership was an eventful one which saw Celtic deny Rangers a two-peat. Ange Postecoglou took Celtic to their 52nd league title, pipping arch-rivals Rangers, led by Giovanni van Bronckhorst. Gers did, however, reach the Europa League finals where they lost out on penalties to Eintracht Frankfurt.
On the other end of the table, we saw Dundee dropping to the Scottish Championship and St. Johnstone surviving the Premiership playoff and ensuring another year in the top flight.
In such an eventful season, the fans made their opinions known, especially on social media and we worked out which Scottish club had the most ‘vulgar’ fans on Instagram.
To do that, we scraped comments from five random Instagram posts of all 12 clubs competing in the 2021-22 Scottish Premiership. We then ran those comments through an automated sentiment analysis tool to ascertain that and here are the results.
Aberdeen fans were the most foul-mouthed on Instagram
With 27% of all comments having at least one swear word, Aberdeen fans were the most vulgar.
The Dons had a tough season, finishing 10th and their fans made their displeasure known. The F-bomb was the swear word of choice, followed by ‘shit’ and the other variant, ‘shite’.
The second-most vulgar fans were that of Hibernian, with 20% of all comments containing a swear word.
What was surprising was that Dundee’s fans did not top this list – they were the fourth most vulgar with 13% of comments containing at least one swear word.
St Johnstone fans were the least vulgar
What was even more surprising than Dundee fans not being the most vulgar?
Despite finishing 11th (and then surviving the Premiership play-off), St. Johnstone fans were the least vulgar with only 2% comments containing a swear word.
Was this a sign of acceptance that they were not good enough? Maybe.
Celtic and Rangers – who was more foul-mouthed?
When it comes to the big boys of Scottish football, Celtic fans, despite tasting more success, were more vulgar than Rangers fans.
13% of comments on Celtic’s posts had swear words, compared to 4% on Rangers’ posts.
Was this great clean up work by the Rangers social media admin, or did Gers fans brigade the Bhoys’ Instagram profile? Well, in the world of football, anything is possible.
Methodology:
- We picked 5-10 posts on Instagram from each of the 12 clubs participating in the 2021-22 Scottish Premiership – the time span for which was the 2021-22 season
- We scraped those posts for comments which were run through an automated sentiment analysis tool
- The tool then gave us a breakdown of the sentiments and usage of swear words
