Football Fever Of 2022
Let us check your knowledge of football (known as soccer in the U.S.). Do you know which country is going to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup? If you do not know, read till the end of this blog post to find the answer. Did you happen to catch football fever in 2022? Football is the most popular sport in the world, with more than 3.5 billion fans! One of the most-watched sporting events in the world is the FIFA World Cup, held every four years. The most recent edition was FIFA 2022, watched by more than a billion people. Perhaps you are one of the fans who watched the thrilling final match between Argentina and France live on December 18, 2022.
When you search for something (e.g., “FIFA World Cup 2022”) on the web, it is very likely that one of the first matches is a page on Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia available in 332 languages that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers around the world. My research question was to discover what the history of the Wikipedia page for FIFA World Cup 2022 tells us about the popularity of the sport and the event, reflected by the number of users making edits on the page, the number of page views, and the number of revisions over time. My other question was to find out how the statistics differed between the English and Spanish Wikipedia pages for this event.
The Wikipedia page for FIFA World Cup 2022 was the fourth-most viewed page on Wikipedia in all of 2022, with more than 46 million views! One measure of the popularity of a Wikipedia page is the number of editors and revisions of the page. The chart below shows the number of unique users making edits on the page and the number of unique revisions, aggregated by month, since 2009. It is easy to spot the spikes in activity. In December 2010, it was announced that the host country for the 2022 World Cup was finalized to be Qatar, which probably explains the spike at that time. The next two spikes are seen in the summer of 2014 and 2018; these coincide with the FIFA World Cup tournaments in those years, which could explain the spike in interest from football fans for the 2022 World Cup page. The massive spike at the end of 2022 is definitely due to the fact that the tournament was held from November 20 to December 18. The highest number of monthly editors is around 1400 and the highest number of monthly revisions is around 300.
A second measure of the popularity of a Wikipedia page is the time interval between two consecutive edits on the page and the size of changes done on the page. The chart below shows that the median time between consecutive edits is just 977 seconds, which is around 16 minutes, and this is over the entire life of the page, which was created back in 2010. The median size of the change made in a revision is just 27 bytes, which is quite small, indicating that, typically, a user is making a small incremental edit, but few users make more substantial edits of thousands of bytes as shown in the chart below.
The next question was to quantify the popularity in terms of page views over time, look for interesting patterns, and compare the page views of the English language page with the Spanish language page. The last part was interesting, since Spanish is spoken in parts of South America, Europe, and North America, regions where football is popular. The chart below shows the number of daily page views of the two pages. The highest number of daily views for the pages was towards the end of 2022 (when the tournament was in progress). More than two million people viewed the page on a single day in this period. Another spike was seen around the end of March 2022; this is when the 32 national teams competing in the tournament were drawn and placed in four groups. The spike around mid-2018 could be explained by the fact that this was when the previous FIFA World Cup tournament was underway in Russia and football fans probably wanted to check out information about the 2022 tournament. Another interesting observation is that throughout the period in the chart below, the number of daily page views on the Spanish page is consistently less than that of the English page, except during spikes, when the numbers are almost equal. One way this could be explained is that a greater percentage of Spanish-speaking football fans tune into the World Cup tournaments than English-speaking fans.
Another research question is how the daily page views for the Wikipedia page for the 2022 FIFA World Cup compare to other World Cups. The following chart shows the history of page views across time. We can see that the daily page views for the 2018 World Cup peaked at around 1 million views during the summer of 2018, when the tournament was being played in Russia. Similarly, the daily page views for the 2022 World Cup peaked in the winter of 2022 at around 2 million views. We can reliably forecast that the daily page views for the 2026 World Cup will peak in the summer of 2026.
Remember the question asked at the beginning of this post? The 2026 FIFA World Cup is going to be hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. So, if you are a football fan located in North America, get ready to watch the action live and in-person at a stadium near you in three years!
