Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
How has the World Cup affected other Sports on Twitter?
The World Cup is arguably the biggest sporting event in the world, with the final usually generating viewing figures above one billion. It boasts the best players in the world playing each other within quick succession and unites countries behind their national teams for day one.
That being said, the analyst team at fiacuity were interested to know, what affect the World Cup had on other sports who usually take the limelight during the summer, and therefore they have calculated the growth rates across Twitter for other seasonal sports such as Formula One, Wimbledon & Cricket to see how effected they’ve been by the tournament since May. We’ve also taken a look at the growth rates for the leading F1 drivers, the semi finalists in Wimbledon and the World Cup.
Of course, growth rate isn’t the only metric to track success for a brand or a team, as engagements can also provide you with significant insight into how well your social media approach is working. However, growth gives a good indication of reach and how well a brand is expanding it’s audience and for seasonal competitions such as Wimbledon, this is vitally important.
How does the growth compare across sports this summer?
Our analysts have taken the stats Twitter accounts from Wimbledon, Formula 1, England’s Official Cricket Account & FIFA World Cup, in order to analyse the effect of the ‘festival of football’ and the results are extremely interesting.
Primarily, we would expect FIFA World Cup account to grow massively from May-July 2017 to May-June 2018, due to fact the competition only occurs every four years and therefore people are far more likely to engage with this kind of account when it becomes more relevant and between June 11th & July 11th the growth rate was 18.68%. However, it’s clear that the success and interest the football generated had a adverse effect on other major sports that were taking place during the same period.
Wimbledon for example grew on average in 2017, over the two months, by 3.33% as sports fans excitedly looked forward to the Tennis’s biggest event and yet this year over the same time frame the growth rate dropped to 0.42%. Arguably, the loss of Andy Murray for the UK and the inconsistency of Novak Djokovic has played its part in causing some casual fans to lose interest but there can be no denying that the competition coinciding with the World Cup has contributed to this dramatic drop in growth. This statement is supported by English Cricket & F1 seeing similar results over the last two months, with F1’s rate falling from 2.65% in ‘17 to 0.69% in spite of the fact we have an incredibly exciting season with Mercedes and Ferrari both battling closely for the title, just as they were last year. Secondly, English Cricket has also seen a decline, although not quite as potent. It’s certainly possible that the World Cup has distracted a cricket audience who may be more concerned with the football, however the last major Test match was in May prior to the event, whilst it would appear that the ODIs have done less this year to encourage people to follow the cricket team on Twitter, as their growth has come down from 3.04% between June & July in 2017, to 2.31% in 2018.
Arguably, from this we can discern that it is likely that the World Cup monopolises people’s time and becomes such a central part of our lives for a month and therefore it has an effect on our desire to watch other events or actively engage with them on social media. The attention on other sports has also led to a similar drop in growth across individual sports people, with perennial F1 challengers Hamilton, Bottas & Ricciardo all seeing their growth drop, when compared with 2017:
| Formula 1 | ||
| Driver | May – July 17 | May – July 18 |
| Hamilton | 1.90% | 0.19% |
| Bottas | 2.12% | 1.02% |
| Ricciardo | 3.54% | 1.01% |
What can Instagram tell us about World Cup Growth?
In addition to Twitter, the analysts also took a look at the growth rates across Instagram over a four month period of March- July and the data here matched our assertions that the World Cup has driven significant growth for football related accounts, at the expense of other sports. In this case, we looked into the growth for individual sportsman and compared their 2017 vs 2018 growth.
It must be stated, that the huge growth for the football players was always expected due to their amount of air time they received over the last month in the media. However it is remarkable how athletes from F1 & Tennis have been conversely affected. The first example below is a comparison between Edinson Cavani, a Uruguayan striker and perhaps the greatest tennis player of all time Roger Federer.
| Cavani | March | Growth | July | Follower Increase |
| 2017 | 1,810,000 | 23.76% | 2,240,000 | 430,000 |
| 2018 | 3,980,000 | 34.65% | 5,358,928 | 1,378,928 |
| Federer | March | Growth | July | Follower Increase |
| 2017 | 2,900,000 | 18.28% | 3,430,000 | 530,000 |
| 2018 | 4,760,000 | 8.23% | 5,151,590 | 391,590 |
The chart illustrates two important points, firstly that whilst Cavani has had higher growth between the March-July period over the last two years, he has risen this year by nearly 11% whilst Federer has dropped by nearly 10%. Secondly, this has also led to the footballer gaining more followers than Federer over the last four months and whilst the success of football plays a role here, the drop in Tennis’s profile over this same period and particularly during Wimbledon is likely to have been a factor in this. Had Federer merely maintained the same average growth across Instagram has he had in 2017 he would still have more followers than Cavani in spite of the World Cup. Additionally, Federer also had a growth rate on the social network of 21.35% in 2016 and the Swiss maestro has been winning Grand Slams consistency since then, meaning that whilst a small drop might be expected as his follower count gets higher, there must be a further factor and the World Cup’s attention is likely one of them.
What about the World Cups effect on Formula One?
Furthermore, as stated early the World Cup has had an effect on a number of sports including Formula 1. England captain Harry Kane saw his Instagram profile increase considerably during the period with an growth uplift of 45.41%, which was a huge 17% on 2017 whilst Lewis Hamilton saw his growth rate reduce by 3% to 12.53%. Perhaps most interesting is that Kane reduced the gap on Instagram followers on Hamilton from 1.9 million in March to 800,000 in July. The high profile nature of the World Cup and Kane’s role in winning the Golden Boot would have clearly helped boost his profile however yet again we could make the argument that the drop in attention for F1 during this period also played a role.
Our final example, showcases this even further by using two athletes who have comparatively smaller followings than the other examples in this blog; Kasper Schmeichel & Valtteri Bottas. Schmeichel is the Danish goalkeeper who performed numerous penalty saves during the World Cup and famously helped Leicester to the Premier League title. Likewise, Bottas is one of the leading drivers in F1 and is the Number 2 driver for the current Constructors Champions Mercedes.
The purpose of this example is to highlight two individuals who in March had similar followings on Instagram, as well as both being talented athletes who were not expected to win the World Cup or Driver’s Championship respectively. Moreover, both hail from the Nordics and therefore don’t have a huge national population backing them and inflating their follower number.
Below is the graph showing the growth rate for both between March-July 2017 & 2018:
As you can see this is yet further proof that the World Cup has played a huge role in bolstering the followers for football players as Schmeichel rose an astonishing 73.52% during the last four months, whilst Bottas saw his growth rate drop by 50% when compared with 2017. This result also had the added effect of giving the Dane 81k more followers than the Finn, in spite of being behind by 127k in March.
To conclude, from the three cases above we can conclude that not only has the World Cup played a role in improving the social following for countries and FIFA, it has also stretched to the players involved. Arguably this is not a surprise, however what is revealing is that it has had a negative impact on other sports and their representatives, with growth rates dropping from 2017 as well as their football competitors rising above them in terms of overall followers. For football fans, it’s a great shame that the World Cup only happens once every four years but other sports will be breathing a sigh of relief.
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