Cincinnati Stadium Analysis

The city of Cincinnati has two professional sports teams, the Cincinnati Reds and the Cincinnati Bengals. Each of these teams play their games at stadiums located downtown along the Ohio River, with the Reds playing their games at Great American Ball Park and Bengals playing at Paycor Stadium. Each of these venues host games for their respective sports teams, as well as concerts and other events throughout the year.

As competing entertainment venues in downtown Cincinnati, I thought it would be interesting to compare reviews for Great American Ball Park and Paycor Stadium. This will allow for analysis for which stadium has more positive sentiment from fans who have attended games and events at the venue.

Data Collection

In order to perform this analysis, I collected Yelp reviews for each of the Cincinnati stadiums. This involved scraping data from Yelp using HTML element in order to collect 100 reviews from each stadium. The data collected includes information about the reviewer as well as their rating and overall review of their experience. With this information, it is possible to perform a sentiment analysis based on the words written within each review.

Data Dictionary

  • Reviewer Name: The name of the individual who submitted the review

  • Reviewer Location: The city and state in which the reviewer is located in

  • Review Rating: The rating out of 5 given to the venue by the reviewer

  • Review Date: The day, month, and year in which the review was written

  • Review Content: The text included in the written review of the experience at the venue

  • Stadium: Designation of which stadium the review belongs to

Here is a link to the data used for the sentiment analysis:

stadium_reviews.csv

Sentiment Analysis

Question 1

Which Cincinnati professional sports stadium do yelp reviewers have a more positive experience attending games and events at?

In order to answer this question, I collected the total sentiment score for both Great American Ball Park and Paycor Stadium. This involves scraping each individual word out of every review for the respective stadium and assigning the word a positive or negative score. The total positivity score then reflects the difference between the total number of positive words said about the venue in the review minus the total number of negative words mentioned in the review.

It is clear that Great American Ball Park has a much more positive sentiment from reviewers as opposed to Paycor Stadium. Fans attending games, concerts, and other events at GABP appear to hold the stadium in high regard, with a positivity score of just under 500. However, Paycor Stadium does not experience the same level of positive sentiment, as the venue has a score just above zero. This indicates that reviewers are essentially indifferent to their experience at Paycor Stadium.

Question 2

What are the most common emotions expressed by fans attending games or events at Cincinnati sports stadiums?

Answering this question is possible using the NRC emotive lexicon. This tool filters out the most commonly used emotive words across all reviews. With this information, it is possible to compare how often each of these sentiments are applied to each stadium.

The most common emotions linked to reviewers of Paycor Stadium include positivity, joy, and anticipation. This makes sense considering the venue hosts professional sporting events as well as concerts, which are exciting events that fans look forward to attending and pay large sums of money to participate in. It is interesting to note, however, that Paycor had a larger amount of reviews including words linked to fear and disgust than GABP. This helps to support why Paycor has a lower overall sentiment and locate the source of negativity surrounding the football stadium.

For Great American Ball Park, we see a very similar trend in which reviewers experience positive emotions overall with their trip to the baseball stadium. However, it is interesting to note that GABP has a lower score in the trust emotion as opposed to Paycor. This is an interesting emotion, as it raises questions as to the context in which reviewers are using this emotion. My best guess would be that this emotion refers to trust in the team that the reviewer has, or perhaps how much they trust items offered at the concessions within the stadium.

Question 3

Which stadium reflected a more positive experience for reviewers in 2023?

This question can be answered using the total positivity score metric used to answer question one. In order to compare sentiment for both stadiums solely based on the most recent year, we can filter for reviews that were written in the year 2023.

This visual depicts that Great American Ball Park was reviewed in a much more positive vein in 2023 as opposed to Paycor Stadium. Additionally, fans attending events at Paycor Stadium had a negative overall view of their experience. This means their reviews included more total negative words and content than positive ones. GABP, on the other hand, reflected a mildly positive experience overall for fans in 2023 as the positivity score was over 100.

Conclusion

After performing the sentiment analysis, it was quite interesting to me that Great American Ball Park scores much higher in terms of overall positivity as compared to Paycor Stadium. Considering both stadiums are located in the same downtown location and were built within only a few years of each other, I would have guessed that they would be more closely related in terms of overall sentiment. If I were to expand the analysis, I would be interested in studying the difference between overall sentiment for the various types of events offered at each stadium. For example, I think it would be interesting to compare positivity score for reviewers attending a football game versus a concert at Paycor Stadium.