Friday Fact Box: Search and the Soccer World Cup
by Ravi Reddy on 2010/07/16
Within the space of a month, South Africa managed to pull off one of the grandest and most entertaining sporting events the world has seen. This was certainly evident with the large number of World Cup-related searches conducted online.
Below is a list of the world’s most Googled sportsmen. There are many more names to this list, so I have decided to display the top 20 names. You will notice that seven members of the top 20 are footballers. This statistic was taken on the opening day of the World Cup, 11th June 2010.
| Sportsman | Country | Global Monthly Searches |
| Cristiano Ronaldo | Portugal | 1 660 0000 |
| Tiger Woods | USA | 1 360 0000 |
| Ronaldinho | Brazil | 7 480 000 |
| LeBron James | USA | 6 120 000 |
| Kobe Bryant | USA | 5 000 000 |
| Kaka | Brazil | 5 000 000 |
| David Beckham | England | 3 350 000 |
| Usain Bolt | Jamaica | 2 240 000 |
| Roger Federer | Switzerland | 2 240 000 |
| Shaun White | USA | 2 240 000 |
| Fernando Torres | Spain | 1 830 000 |
| Lionel Messi | Argentina | 1 830 000 |
| Travis Pastrana | USA | 1 500 000 |
| Peyton Manning | USA | 1 220 000 |
| Rafael Nadal | Spain | 1 220 000 |
| Sidney Crosby | Canada | 1 220 000 |
| Michael Phelps | USA | 1 220 000 |
| Wayne Rooney | England | 1 000 000 |
| Thierry Henry | France | 1 000 000 |
| Sachin Tendulkar | India | 1 000 000 |
Many searches were conducted for Cristiano Ronaldo, likely due to the recent birth of his child via a mystery lover. David Beckham incurred a severe injury which ruled him out of the world cup, and Ronaldinho’s sudden axe from the Brazil soccer team was an upset to most soccer fans.
The UK football fans were perhaps one of the largest followings throughout the duration of the World Cup. The top ten search terms according to infamous Internet statistic site, Hitwise, were as follows:
- world cup 2010 (4.98% of all UK Internet searches containing the phrase ‘world cup’)
- world cup (3.70%)
- world cup 2010 dates (3.28%)
- england world cup fixtures (1.77%)
- world cup fixtures (1.64%)
- fifa world cup 2010 (1.36%)
- world cup groups (1.10%)
- world cup 2010 wall chart (1.10%)
- fifa world cup (0.74%)
- world cup fantasy football (0.73%)
The World Cup dates were searched for the most, followed by the England team’s fixtures. You will also notice that the search terms peaked prior to the announcement of the England football squad and depleted thereafter. The infographic below details the search terms of UK citizens:
In terms of World Cup sponsors, Comscore revealed that Audi and Visa made use of Yahoo for the World Cup. A Yahoo spokesperson said the two global brands have been the biggest ad buyers for its World Cup site, which was the traffic leader during the first two weeks of the soccer event. Within the first six days of the World Cup, Yahoo Sports amassed 22 million unique visitors to their site. 7.9 million users were specific to the World Cup site.
There has also been a sudden increase in Internet traffic for World Cup sponsors (courtesy of Clickz.com). Check it out below:
| Sportsman | Country | Global Monthly Searches |
| Cristiano Ronaldo | Portugal | 1 660 0000 |
| Tiger Woods | USA | 1 360 0000 |
| Ronaldinho | Brazil | 7 480 000 |
| LeBron James | USA | 6 120 000 |
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