With tons of UFC action taking place throughout these weeks and Twitter still being the preferred place for fighters to talk trash and call each other out, OHBets decided to investigate which of the UFC fighters actually is the most foul-mouthed online.
One thing is talking trash to your opponent in press conferences, but it’s an utterly different ballgame online. Some fighters excel in this discipline, but what are the numbers looking like?
We used the official Twitter API (Tweepy) to scrape thousands of tweets and find out who is the most insulting fighter, based on the percentage of their tweets containing at least one insult.
The most foul-mouthed fighters of the bunch
Some of the key findings
- Tony Ferguson throws the most insults on Twitter of all fighters out there. More than 28% of all his tweets include a word deemed as insulting. His preferred insulting word is “shit” and he has used it 490 times in 2751 tweets.
- Conor McGregor has produced a disappointing 16% insulting tweets.
- In the 2751 tweets posted by Tony Fergusson, the analysis shows they contain 992 insults.
- Middleweight is the most insulting division, with more than 3.3k tweets coming out of that division deemed as containing insults.
- The most active division on Twitter is the Lightweight division with almost 24k tweets from fighters in that division.
- The most common insults involve the words “rat”, “bad” and “shit”.
The table above shows the percentage of insults in the tweets of each of the top 10 most foul-mouthed fighters’ tweets. Given the reputation of Conor McGregor, it might come as a surprise that he is only ranked as number nine on this list.
Insults to total Tweets ratio
Looking at this table, which shows the number of insults used and the total number of tweets posted, Tony Ferguson again comes in with more insults than any others, with almost twice as many as Darren Till, who came in second place with 561 insults.
It seems like being a UFC fighter and a trash talker go hand in hand, as everybody gets involved in the action. It is interesting to see that none of the current champions actually spend their time throwing insults around online though. Perhaps there’s some correlation to be found there? You can be judge on that yourself.
Check out the full data
All the data can be found here.