Blind Spot 01 · Relational
Emotional Contagion Network Architecture
Who spreads affect — positive and negative — and in which direction
Clubs measure individual mental strength. Nobody measures the relational emotional network — which player, when they have a bad 10 minutes, drags the performance of the three nearest players down. And which player lifts it. These are different individuals and the difference is quantifiable through HRV data, video-based facial action coding, and proximity-weighted performance correlations.
Klopp's "mentality monsters" was an intuitive version of this. He wasn't describing individual strength — he was describing players who amplify positive affect in others. That network property is measurable. It's just not being measured.
The Market InefficiencyA squad of individually mentally strong players can be a collectively fragile emotional network. One emotionally contagious player can be tanking the collective performance of four teammates — and never appear in any traditional metric.
Available Data Sources — Now
Post-match interview NLP sentiment scoring on press conference transcripts — frustration signals, tone changes
Social media posting patterns — frequency and emotional valence before/after matches
GPS positional proximity data — who runs near whom under pressure, who separates
Broadcast footage — body language analysis after conceding goals, who faces teammates vs turns away
Apify Actors To Build This
instagram-scrapertwitter-scraperyoutube-transcript-scraperweb-scraperScrape player social posts + press conference transcripts + post-match interviews. Run NLP sentiment scoring. Map affect valence timeline against match performance data. Identify contagion nodes.