West Ham fans' mood change towards Dimitri Payet in January

Dimitri Payet's transfer to Marseille has made him an unpopular figure at the London Stadium - and social media analysis conducted for Sky Sports reveals just how dramatically West Ham supporters' attitudes changed towards their 2016 player of the year over the past month. 

At the start of January, France playmaker Payet was a firm fan favourite. Over two-thirds of Twitter posts published about him by West Ham followers were positive.

However, the mood shifted significantly on January 12 when the player handed in a transfer request in an attempt to force through a return to his homeland.

In the subsequent 48 hours, there was a surge in online discussion about Payet, with 56 per cent of West Ham fans' tweets having a negative sentiment.

During Payet's absence from the first team over the following weeks he continued to be criticised - and the reaction of West Ham supporters in the aftermath of his eventual £25m switch, which was completed on Monday, summed up how opinions shifted on the midfielder.

In the 36 hours after his transfer, anger was the overriding emotion detected in tweets by West Ham fans, according to social media analysers Blurrt.

In fact, 38 per cent of tweets were angry posts, while 13 per cent conveyed sadness at the loss of such a talented player.

However, 21 per cent of tweets were happy, seemingly from West Ham supporters pleased to wave goodbye to a 29-year-old who was no longer committed to their cause.

Indeed, among the most popular emojis used in tweets about Payet after his move was a waving hand, along with a dollar sign, the West Ham Irons symbol and a monkey covering its eyes - possibly reflecting the disbelief that the deal had been done.

What do Blurrt do?

Blurrt collects and analyses every tweet posted by fans about Premier League clubs and players, recognising whether it is positive, neutral or negative and if there is emotion, such as anger, happiness or thankfulness by running the text through their own custom-built Natural Language Processing (NLP) system.

This means they can not only see who's the most talked about, but see which players have the most positivity or negativity within online conversations and look to see why people are feeling this way, as well as who those people are.

Blurrt can identify fans of Premier League clubs from Twitter bios and draw conclusions as to how a certain team's fans are reacting to events as they unfold.