Google Trends as an explanatory variable of the FCTP index

Investment in football has been considered as an alternative investment as it is de-correlated with the evolution of the main stock market indices. This may be caused by the emotional nature of these investments. In this article we aim to measure the impact of emotions on the profitability of football clubs listed in the stock market. For this, we use Google Trends as an indicator of sentiment (explanatory variables) and the FCTP index as a reference for the profitability of football clubs (endogenous variable). We apply an econometric linear regression model and we find that this sentiment metric is statistically significant for explaining the evolution of the FCTP, both on economic issues and on exclusively soccer issues.