Can you measure love? Of course you can and we at Rowdie have a theory for that. Because “Love is not something you just feel, but rather something you do”.
By “doing love” we not only mean playing it actively but also reading about it, watching football games and stuff like that. What we did is, we “knocked” on the doors of Google to see how popular football really is and some really interesting results came out. You can see the charts and overview on the table with some insights underneath.
| Position | Country | Population | Football related search | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Argentina | 44.3 Million | Up to 11 Million | 24.8% |
| 2 | Spain | 46.6 Million | Up to 9 Million | 19.3% |
| 3 | Scotland | 5.5 Million | Up to 1 Million | 18.2% |
| 4 | England | 56 Million | Up to 10 Million | 17.9% |
| 5 | Wales | 3.1 Million | 100k – 500k | 16.1% |
| 6 | France | 67 Million | Up to 10 Million | 14.9% |
| 7 | Germany | 83 Million | Up to 10 Million | 12.0% |
| 8 | Portugal | 10.3 Million | 700k – 900k | 8.7% |
| 9 | Brazil | 209 Million | Up to 15 Million | 7.1% |
| 10 | Northern Ireland | 1.9 Million | less than 100k | 5.2% |
| 11 | Ireland | 4.8 Million | less than 100k | 2.1% |
| 12 | Russia | 144.5 Million | Up to 1 Million | 0.007% |
| 13 | China | 1386 Million | less than 500k | 0.0% |
Football related search is count per month in a peak season
To compare data you have to take into account the total population of the country. From this reason the charts has been done by comparing the percentage of population searching for football related content.
We start to look at the table from the bottom. Countries such as China or Russia are in the charts just out of our curiosity. We clearly see that in both countries the game is staying out of everyday life.
Coming back to the top positions, we did expect Latin America to rule the charts. With almost 25% we have there Argentina, while Brazil is for some reason on position number 9 with 7.1%.
Interesting are the positions number 3,4 and 5. We clearly see that football is dominant in everyday life through most of the UK. The only exception is Northern Ireland with 5.2%. Surprising is the fact that Scotland is 0.3% ahead of England. In the UK were dominant search phrases such as Premier League table, Football results or Football Today.
Football related search phrases in Spain were Barcelona, Real and La Liga. Both Spain and Argentina have their high chart position because of one search phrase – Lionel Messi.
Surprising is the low percentage in Portugal. The number would have been even much lower if we excluded Cristiano Ronaldo from the search phrase list.
In Germany were people searching mostly for German Bundesliga, Bayern and Borussia Dortmund, while in France for League 1, Kylian Mbappe and PSG. Ireland was surprisingly low on search volume, it all changed when we asked for Conor McGregor. The popularity of UFC and Conor McGregor in Ireland is according to Google 10 times higher than football.
