The World Cup is the world’s most anticipated and viewed sporting event, estimated to be watched by billions of people globally. Every 4 years, countries anticipate this esteemed tournament organized by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which determines which of 32 international men’s football (soccer) teams will take home the championship.
This year, Argentina played France in the World Cup Final. With Lionel Messi’s World Cup Instagram picture breaking the record for most liked picture on the platform, we noticed that social media played a massive role in World Cup coverage and reactions. This resulted in significant boosts in social media followings for these soccer players. To see how the World Cup can propel someone to fame via social media, we were curious how Instagram followers grew for each player.
Using the Databar.ai, we gathered the Instagram follower counts and data before and after the Finals to see how follower counts have grown.
World Cup Players
We gathered data for the folllowing players/usernames on Instagram:
k.mbappe
upamecano
raphaelvarane
thuram_17
o.dembele7
theo3hernandez
oliviergiroud
antogriezmann
axel_disasi
ibrahimakonate
adrienrabiot_25
aurelientchm
jkeey4
tagliafico3
leomessi
nicoigonzalez
rodridepaul
papugomez_official
lucasalario
lucasocampos11
angeldimariajm
leoparedes20
tucucorrea
locelsogiovani
emi_martinez26
The players highlighted blue are players from the Argentina team.
Getting the data
In order to gather the data, we looked at the Instagram usernames of each player from the France and Argentina teams (shown above) and entered them into a Databar table:
The resulting dataset includes 25 total players. Next we added the social media enrichments to the table to gather bios, followers, followings, and other data from each player's social media profile.
Through Databar.ai, we're able to connect to social media APIs without code and schedule enrichments to gather Instagram followers of each player in our dataset. Once the enrichment was installed, all that was left to do was to click the 'Run all rows' button to launch the enrichment and gather Instagram data for each row in our table.
The result
We scheduled the enrichment to run 4 times: once on December 17 '22 before the match, December 19 '22 after the match, December 22 '22 (5 days after the match), and January 14 (almonst a month after the Finals). The resulting data is shown below:
Username | Team | Followers Dec 17 '22 | Followers Dec 19 '22 | Followers Dec 22 '22 | Followers Jan 14 '23 |
k.mbappe | FRA | 78,469,149 | 83,605,440 | 88,059,361 | 94,814,369 |
upamecano | FRA | 664,021 | 681,504 | 714,616 | 777,844 |
raphaelvarane | FRA | 20,278,089 | 20,337,053 | 20,394,479 | 20,574,392 |
thuram_17 | FRA | 402,583 | 436,720 | 497,976 | 588,030 |
o.dembele7 | FRA | 12,567,120 | 12,647,966 | 12,732,668 | 13,048,066 |
theo3hernandez | FRA | 3,349,584 | 3,396,963 | 3,436,095 | 3,494,161 |
oliviergiroud | FRA | 1,841,900 | 2,010,658 | 2,167,099 | 2,389,040 |
antogriezmann | FRA | 37,649,124 | 37,800,109 | 37,943,589 | 38,314,759 |
axel_disasi | FRA | 46,840 | 56,370 | 63,153 | 75,774 |
ibrahimakonate | FRA | 1,186,686 | 1,219,270 | 1,264,374 | 1,329,901 |
adrienrabiot_25 | FRA | 2,209,442 | 2,234,510 | 2,256,994 | 2,288,831 |
aurelientchm | FRA | 2,936,930 | 3,075,508 | 3,210,585 | 3,510,854 |
jkeey4 | FRA | 2,050,145 | 2,100,703 | 2,148,045 | 2,298,517 |
tagliafico3 | ARG | 2,102,815 | 2,367,439 | 2,763,313 | 3,285,677 |
leomessi | ARG | 391,528,134 | 399,221,461 | 407,135,856 | 418,980,396 |
nicoigonzalez | ARG | 783,141 | 881,178 | 1,001,678 | 1,118,957 |
rodridepaul | ARG | 7,778,547 | 8,738,919 | 10,063,780 | 11,114,967 |
papugomez_official | ARG | 5,408,917 | 5,680,585 | 6,215,321 | 6,708,683 |
lucasalario | ARG | 994,764 | 997,120 | 999,294 | 1,000,430 |
lucasocampos11 | ARG | 739,679 | 756,665 | 778,190 | 778,190 |
angeldimariajm | ARG | 20,373,280 | 21,396,939 | 22,609,380 | 23,960,496 |
leoparedes20 | ARG | 6,447,135 | 7,061,866 | 7,864,140 | 8,667,459 |
tucucorrea | ARG | 2,899,619 | 3,087,486 | 3,335,443 | 3,511,704 |
locelsogiovani | ARG | 2,553,374 | 2,684,097 | 2,854,475 | 2,991,682 |
emi_martinez26 | ARG |
|
| 9,437,323 | 10,751,922 |
After the World Cup, Kylian Mbappe gained 5.1M followers (6.5% growth), Leo Messi gained 7.6M followers (1.9% growth), and Angel Di Maria gained 1M followers (5% growth).
The chart below shows how each player grew on Instagram over the 4 days. Click into the legend to select a specific player and see how their Instagram following grew:
The chart below shows how many Instagram followers each player gained after the World Cup:
Summarizing
As we can observe, the World Cup led to a significant surge in Instagram followers for the players. With all players from both sides totalling 622.4M followers on the platform after the final game (665M on Jan 14 2023), there is no doubting that social media is a powerful medium in launching someone into the spotlight.
All of the above visualizations were created with the Databar platform. Sign up here to get access.
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