OneLove beyond the field -- A few-shot pipeline for topic and sentiment analysis during the FIFA World Cup in Qatar

The FIFA World Cup in Qatar was discussed extensively in the news and on social media. Due to news reports with allegations of human rights violations, there were calls to boycott it. Wearing a OneLove armband was part of a planned protest activity. Controversy around the armband arose when FIFA threatened to sanction captains who wear it. To understand what topics Twitter users Tweeted about and what the opinion of German Twitter users was towards the OneLove armband, we performed an analysis of German Tweets published during the World Cup using in-context learning with LLMs. We validated the labels on human annotations. We found that Twitter users initially discussed the armband's impact, LGBT rights, and politics; after the ban, the conversation shifted towards politics in sports in general, accompanied by a subtle shift in sentiment towards neutrality. Our evaluation serves as a framework for future research to explore the impact of sports activism and evolving public sentiment. This is especially useful in settings where labeling datasets for specific opinions is unfeasible, such as when events are unfolding.