Analyzing an English football social network
In the previous section, we analyzed a small personal social network and got a good grasp of the basic concepts of social networks. In this section, we will analyze a much larger social network of Facebook brand pages which are directly or indirectly associated with English football. We will be associating ourselves with the English Premier League (EPL) which is the top tier of football competition in the English football league system.
Note
English Premier League is a corporation with 20 football clubs who act as member shareholders. A football season in the EPL typically runs from August to May where each team plays a total of 38 matches.
The following figure depicts the official logo of the English Premier League for the season of 2016-17:
We shall be extracting a huge network of Facebook pages related to the EPL and then analyzing it in detail to understand social networks better. Without further ado, let...