How Online Sports Fandom Tips Into Polarization: Five Pathways Identified

Online group polarization around sporting events has become a serious problem for digital public opinion governance, and a new study argues that it rarely happens by accident. Drawing on social combustion theory, researchers Jianshan Bai, Deping Hu and Tao Wang of Shanghai University of Sport analyzed 24 high-profile Chinese sports incidents from 2017 to 2024 using crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, a method built on Boolean algebra and set theory that identifies configurations of conditions linked to an outcome. Their analysis, published in PLOS One, identifies five distinct configurational pathways through which online group polarization emerges, and two underlying generative mechanisms: a “sensitive issues–emotional narrative” mechanism and a “non-sensitive issues–capital involvement” mechanism.

The study defines online group polarization carefully, distinguishing it from cyberbullying, online violence, public opinion crises and ordinary public criticism. Cyberbullying and online violence involve deliberate harmful actions aimed at specific individuals, often with a power imbalance, while public criticism denotes reasoned, issue-oriented dissent without malicious intent. Online group polarization instead describes a process through which collective attitudes shift toward more extreme positions, and it does not require two mutually hostile factions as a prerequisite. The authors distinguish two forms: unidirectional collective radicalization, in which moderately critical attitudes intensify into strong negative sentiment within a single community, and bilateral factional polarization, in which two identifiable opposing blocs form and hostile exchanges between them escalate conflict. Both fall within the conceptual domain of group polarization, a phenomenon originally described by James Stoner, in which group discussion produces decisions more extreme and risk-oriented than the individual positions held beforehand.

The theoretical backbone is social combustion theory, proposed by Niu Wenyuan of the Chinese School of Social Physics, which borrows concepts from physics to explain adverse social events. It posits three essential elements: “combustible materials,” the underlying drivers of social disorder such as imbalances in human–nature relationships and human–human conflicts; “oxidizers,” factors such as misleading media coverage, exaggeration, rumor dissemination and the amplification of public sentiment; and “ignition temperature,” sudden incidents of sufficient scale and impact that precipitate upheaval. The study maps seven conditional variables onto this framework. Political triggers serve as combustible material; news narrative frames, opinion leaders and capital intervention act as oxidizers; and first media, event attributes and stakeholder participation function as ignition temperatures or flashpoints.

Each variable was operationalized with explicit coding rules. Political triggers included issues extending beyond the sports domain into broader political conflicts, and political actions by participants, such as Moroccan players displaying Palestinian-themed symbols at the Qatar World Cup. An inflammatory or satirical news narrative framework was coded when headlines contained keywords with explicit negative emotional connotations, such as “fake” or “fraud,” or when reports selectively emphasized negative aspects while omitting critical context. Opinion leaders were defined as bloggers with large followings, with any public statement containing negatively connoted keywords counted as an expression of negative emotion. Capital intervention was identified through evidence of platform-driven traffic bias favoring rivalry content and of athletes’ management teams and sponsors deliberately reinforcing public personas and linking events to commercial marketing.

The outcome variable, extreme social emotions, was coded with a dual-mode rule. The researchers compared random samples of early-stage comments from low-traffic periods with highly visible comments at the peak of a trending topic; if early comments were predominantly moderate and rational while peak-period comments contained widespread abusive language, sarcasm, derogatory remarks or other extreme sentiment, the case met the core criterion for group polarization. Separately, a case was coded positively if two relatively balanced and mutually hostile opinion camps could be clearly distinguished during the peak period. Three researchers independently coded the 24 cases, resolving discrepancies by consensus; Fleiss’ kappa coefficients ranged from 0.822 to 1.00, indicating high inter-coder consistency.

Case selection followed QCA principles of similarity and diversity. All incidents were high-profile events covered by national- or central-level media, spanning track and field, soccer and skiing competitions between 2017 and 2024, and ranging from mega-events to local competitions. The sample incorporated both MDSO configurations, in which similar conditions produce different outcomes, and MSDO configurations, in which identical outcomes arise from different conditions. During truth-table construction the authors found a contradictory configuration between Case 7 and Case 20; re-examination revealed that the outcome variable for Case 20 had been omitted, and the coding was corrected. Boolean minimization then yielded the configurational pathways, with a consistency threshold of 0.80 and a case frequency threshold of 1, and a robustness test raising the threshold to 0.90 left the findings unchanged.

The single-condition necessity test showed that news narrative framing and opinion leaders had consistency values exceeding 0.90 and 0.80 respectively, suggesting they may be regarded as necessary and sufficient conditions under conventional QCA criteria. However, an exception in Case 24, where polarization occurred without a divergent news narrative, led the authors to treat news narrative framing as near-necessary rather than strictly necessary. In that case, skepticism from opinion leaders such as the running-community figure “Dingding Runner” supplied enough ignition temperature even without media sensationalism. Conversely, the consistency values of political triggers and capital intervention exceeded 0.80 for cases where polarization did not occur, indicating these conditions are not significant subsets of the outcome.

The most prevalent pathway, Path 1, with a raw coverage of 0.50, covered eight cases and combined inflammatory news narratives, opinion leaders and sensitive event attributes as core present conditions, with capital intervention absent. Its illustrative case is the death of Chinese badminton player Zhang Zhijie, who collapsed during the 2024 Asian Junior Badminton Championships on June 30, 2024. Sensational headlines containing phrases such as “sudden death” and “the family’s despair” heightened engagement, a prominent influencer alleged that CPR and an automated external defibrillator had not been administered during the initial two-minute emergency response, and the athlete’s sister publicly voiced dissatisfaction with the organizers, amplifying public emotion. The case exemplified unidirectional radicalization within a single community, with no opposing faction of comparable size emerging.

Path 2, with raw coverage of 0.3125, illustrates the second mechanism: polarization without sensitive issues or political conflict, driven instead by sensationalized narratives and capital intervention. Its case is the Paris 2024 Olympic women’s singles table tennis final, in which Chen Meng’s victory over Sun Yingsha triggered controversy. Event-related hashtags proliferated, loosely connected supporters coalesced into organized fan groups, and discourse shifted from the sporting event itself to competing identity claims. Unverified and misleading information circulated, including allegations by a company executive that Chen Meng’s victory resulted from favoritism, and the previously unified fan community fragmented into two antagonistic camps exchanging hostile remarks and personal attacks. The authors caution, however, that publicly available comment data may be incomplete because platform algorithms or government regulation may have removed dissenting opinions, so Path 2 findings should be interpreted with caution.

Across the pathways, news narrative framing and opinion leaders emerge as near-necessary catalysts, appearing as core conditions in nearly every configuration. Capital intervention, the authors conclude, cannot independently initiate public opinion conflicts; without ignition sources it lacks content resources for amplification, functioning instead as a fuel that intensifies disorder once a trigger has emerged. Event attributes and capital intervention never occur simultaneously in the same configuration, suggesting functionally equivalent but distinct triggering logics. The study’s limitations are acknowledged: binary coding may oversimplify complex phenomena, micro-level factors received limited attention, the Chinese context may limit generalizability, and the framework rests solely on social combustion theory. The authors recommend that organizers of events involving sensitive issues take the lead in information dissemination with timely, objective explanations, and that governance of fan-community disorder combine improved content moderation, reassessment of algorithmic neutrality, and value-oriented indicators such as sportsmanship in recommendation algorithms, citing UEFA’s Respect Initiative at the 2022 Women’s EURO, during which roughly 60 percent of non-compliant posts were removed.

Subject of Research: Configurational pathways and mechanisms leading to online group polarization in sporting events

Article Title: Pathways to the emergence of online group polarization in sports events

Article References: Bai, J., Hu, D., & Wang, T. (2026). Pathways to the emergence of online group polarization in sports events. PLOS One, 21(10), e0361299. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0361299

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0361299

Keywords: online group polarization, sports events, social combustion theory, cs QCA, public opinion, opinion leaders, news framing, capital intervention, fan communities, digital governance, PLOS One, China