Audience records, revenue, goals scored, controversy… The 2022 World Cup is the edition of all superlatives. And it’s not Twitter that will say the opposite. Because the sporting event has also generated records on the side of the firm with the blue bird. With more than 113 million posts published, the World Cup generated 60% more messages compared to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, according to data from Visibrain*, a social media monitoring platform. On the other hand, posts concerning the boycott movement represent only 3% of messages, added Visibrain.
Two days after the defeat of France (#MerciLesBleus), and once our tears have dried, we take stock of this World Cup on Twitter.
1. Streams of tweets during the final
Unsurprisingly, the France-Argentina final was the most commented match of this World Cup, with 25.9 million posts, three times more than for the France-Croatia match in 2018. this legendary match alone accounted for a quarter of the messages published throughout the competition.
Certain moments have also exploded the counters: 106,500 messages to the first goal of Lionel Messi and 97,600 that of Di Maria. Nothing compared to Kylian Mbappé’s double. His two goals, which allowed France to equalize in less than two minutes (we love you Kiks), generated more than 145,400 tweets, again according to figures from Visibrain. His second shot also generated 24,400 tweets per second, noted Elon Musk, the new boss of Twitter, “a record for a World Cup”.
A few minutes later, 127,300 posts were posted when Messi scored a second goal – Argentina’s third – then 119,800 posts for Kylian Mbappé’s hat-trick in the 118th minute. But it is the coronation of Argentina, during the penalty shootout, which broke the records with 312,600 posts.
2. Four weeks of highlights
But it’s not just this final (which it’s hard to recover from) that made people talk about it. During these four weeks of competition, Twitter ignited several times. Starting with the opening ceremony, hosted by Korean artist Jungkook, about which more than 10 million messages have been posted. During the Saudi Arabia-Argentina match, the surprise victory of the Saudis resulted in 864,000 messages. More than a million posts were recorded during the Morocco-Portugal match, which took the Atlas Lions to the semi-finals, an unprecedented feat for an African or Arab team. Then come the Argentina-Croatia semi-final, with 623,000 posts, and the France-Morocco duel with 469,000 posts.
3. Argentina, generator of posts
It makes sense, but it is obviously the winners of this 2022 World Cup who have been talked about the most. More than 41.3 million messages were published on the Argentina team, against 20.3 million on the Blues and 9.1 million on Neymar’s Brazil.
4. Kylian Mbappé in our hearts and in our tweets
Zoom on our Blues. The France team, led by its captain Hugo Lloris, generated 20.3 million tweets. It will come as no surprise to very few, but, individually, it was Kylian Mbappé, the competition’s top scorer, who ignited Twitter with more than 9.2 million messages about him, more than on the whole team. from Brazil. On the second step of the podium, we find Olivier Giroud, with 1.4 million posts, followed by Antoine Griezmann, with 843,000.
5. Messi, king of the World Cup and of Twitter
Lionel Messi, voted best player of the World Cup and winner of the tournament with Argentina, was cited more than 33 million times during the World Cup, according to figures communicated by Twitter. The Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo comes far behind with 11.5 million citations, ahead of Kylian Mbappé and Neymar (7.9).
*Visibrain has counted all publications with the hashtags #CDM, #WorldCup or #CopadoMundo, published since the start of the competition on November 20.