Introduction

The World Cup is the definition of a global stage. Every four years 32 countries send their best players forward to represent their nation. What if your country doesn’t make it to the World Cup? Do you just not watch at all? Do you watch and root for the closest country to you? Do you root against your neighbor? Do you root for the team of your favorite player? This report seeks to understand the behavior of countries that didn’t make it to the world cup and how they direct their attention.

Data

I used data from Google Trends. Google Trends “reflects the search interest in particular topics.” It provides a rate of search volume when compared to all other search traffic in that particular country. This data is on the scale of 1-100. I looked up each individual team in the World Cup and combined all the output into one file. Using a program I wrote I parsed through the data set and set the highest interest level of each country to the value 6. This number is arbitrary but it allows us to see the top 6 most popular World Cup teams in each country. This also means that countries with a low interest in the World Cup are still assigned most popular teams on the scale of 1-6.

Predictions

Given how globalized soccer/football is as a sport it’s easy to predict that many of the teams will have multiple countries rooting for them. Why they’re rooting for them depends on a whole variety of factors. I would predict that geography will be the main influence of who roots for who. Popularity of players will also be an important influence but not as powerful as geographic proximity.

Maps

Use the arrows left and right of the World Cup team name to navigate to different maps. You can also click on the name of the World Cup team to bring up a list of all the teams in the World Cup.

Please give the maps time to load. There are 32 maps that need to be individually rendered.

Free Takes

Group D is the Group of Death

Group D has two of the best teams in the world. Former world cup champions France, led by burgeoning star Kylian Mbappe. And the UEFA Group F winners Denmark. Australia and Tunisia were the underdogs. Everyone was watching for them to upset two of the best teams. This reflects well in the interest map of Australia. In Italy, one of France’s biggest rivals, Australia was the team with the most national interest. Tunisia’s map doesn’t reflect the same interest as they predictably didn’t qualify for the group stage.

Japan is a True Underdog

Going into the world cup Japan had some of the lowest interest scores (most of their 5-3 values are small islands with low search volume). But after upsetting the highly anticipated German team and remaining at the top of their group. They again proved that they are a legitimate threat defeating Spain and qualifying for the round of 16.

Ronaldo Claims His Spot as King

As long as I’ve followed and played soccer/football there has been a debate about who the best player in the world is. For most of my life the debate was between Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Now with both of these players getting older and announcing that this is their last world cup appearance all eyes on on these legends to leave it all on the field. If you look at interest graphs for their respective teams (Argentina for Messi and Portugal for Ronaldo) you can see a clear difference in their interest levels across the world. This can’t all be explained by the popularity of these super starts, but it does make a strong case for who the world is more interested in watching.