If there’s one thing Star Wars has given sports, it’s the phrase “Evil Empire.” It’s used liberally by people who hate a team, and fans who love them and relish being the villain. Sometimes it means a team perceived to be a cheater, other times it’s when a team loads its roster with talent. Either way, it’s high time we discovered who the biggest “Evil Empire” in sports is.
What we did is search “[team name] evil empire” on Twitter and count the number of tweets specifically directed at the team since Jan 1, 2015. For sake of fairness we only looked at tweets that used the official team name, so no “Habs” or “Yanks,” for instance.
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Here are the results from each major sport.
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