How many Instagram followers did Argentinian and French World Cup players gain after the Finals

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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