Love it or leave it, the World Cup is nearly with us. Soon images of football (soccer) glory and despair will be sent from Doha to the world’s now 8 billion people.
Along with those images will be libraries worth of words on protest campaigns, fortunes worth of advertising sprees (even in this climate) and millions of gallons of water cooler buzz. But what does it all mean? How do we cut through the defence to find our “goal,” what we really want? We offer some ideas below.
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World Cup Match Stats
The biggest sporting event on the planet will kick off Sunday in Qatar, with the choice of the host country only one of the storylines. At every major tournament more stories emerge, resonate and go viral, from headbutts and vuvuzelas to Cristiano Ronaldo personally impacting the stock price of Coca Cola. The media world, at its worst, is a crowd of content-slingers crawling on top of each other to attract your eyeballs.
But looking at the virality of a piece, its social media engagements, is only part of the story. Every match is followed by statistics that tell the deeper meaning of what happened, from ball touches to possession percentage to the distance run by individual players, like David Beckham’s 16 kilometers in a match against Greece.
In the spirit of the World Cup and getting more, better data on news, Overtone has put a day’s worth of “match ups” of articles about the tournament.
Not Everyone’s World Cup of Tea
The first question many people have about the World Cup in Qatar is whether it should be happening there in the first place, given the corruption at FIFA during the selection process, and whether the viewing public should “engage” with it at all.
This matchup was an article from former German football star Philipp Lahm (originally for Die Zeit but republished in English by The Guardian) about his decision not to go to the tournament against an article from Johannesburg-based commentator Tafi Mhaka in Al Jazeera (owned by the Qatari state) defending it.
Holding the World Cup in Qatar has damaged football and I will not be going - The Guardian
World Cup: Africa knows Qatar’s pain and joy - Al Jazeera
The story that comes through the data for these pieces is that both are in-depth and more considered than other hot takes. What the data also shows is that they approach the issue from slightly different angles, with Mhaka discussing racism and pulling in factual statements from his experiences growing up and Lahm sticking more with pure opinion and the language of human rights.
As support for a boycott grows and some European cities, going beyond Lahm’s suggestion, decide not to broadcast matches publicly, the German’s piece is more widely appreciated, with 2,700 engagements on Facebook, a smattering on Twitter and more than 4,400 on Reddit, according to BuzzSumo. Mhaka’s is less popular, with 1,800 engagements almost all on Facebook.
Highlights vs the Full Match
Even if you decide to not boycott and end up paying attention to the World Cup, there are decisions about whether you will follow every minute or just passingly check the scores. Sports news, like news in general, comes in different forms.
If you, for example, are in New York and riding the subway to work in the morning, do you want to know everything about the U.S. Men’s National Team or do you just want to have a passing knowledge to not sound stupid at the bar later?
This matchup is two from the same outlet, ESPN. One piece is about an injury to an American defender, while the other is talking to a potential young star.
USMNT defender Chris Richards out of World Cup with injury - ESPN
They both have roughly the same, relatively small, traction on social media, so you can’t really rely on the crowd helping you choose between the two pieces.
Looking at the content (perhaps using an algorithm or two) helps. Do you have time to read the whole article before the next stop? Do you want “just the facts?” By looking at the content you can see one piece is essentially a news wire story and the other is an in-depth feature reported from the ground in Qatar.
Which Bud is for You?
The other group of people watching the World Cup are The Brands, from the folks at Adidas (fresh off their Kanye West attention) to Coca-Cola (praying not to repeat the Ronaldo fiasco above).
If you are working in communications for a big company you need to know what people are writing about an event but also what people are writing about *you.* This matchup is between two articles focused on Budweiser, the official beer sponsor of the tournament. As of the sending of this newsletter it appears that there will not be alcoholic beverages sold within stadiums themselves, though there has been a lot of back and forth with Qatari authorities on the matter.
'Not only is it over-priced, it's bloody Budweiser!': Fans left stunned at being charged almost £12 for less than a pint at the World Cup... with supporters being limited to just FOUR drinks per order - Mail Online
Beer to cost nearly $14 per half-litre inside Qatar's main World Cup fan zone - source - Reuters
Both the piece from Reuters and the piece from the Mail Online deal with the same subject, the price of beer at the World Cup, and have the word Budweiser prominently mentioned. But if you are working for AB InBev you need to be able to treat them (and the thousands of other articles on the subject) based on what is actually in them. The Daily Mail piece is a collection of attacking tweets and the Reuters piece is playing fairly straight down the middle. If all you are going by is clicks and shares then these two articles look the same, even when they aren’t.
Viral vs Hidden Gem
The thing that the final score of a football match also can’t tell you is how close the game actually was, or how much effort the players gave on the pitch. There are gutsy performances on all sides even when the U.S. women beat Thailand 13-0 in the last World Cup.
Looking at the content of an article itself, rather than the engagement metrics, can be similar. This is a matchup between a piece from HuffPost that was one of the most shared articles in the last couple weeks, according to tracker BuzzSumo, and one with very little social engagement at all from the Fuller Project.
Female migrant workers speak out about harassment in Qatar’s World Cup hotels - Fuller Project
Australian Women Sue Qatar Over Forced Airport Vaginal Exams - HuffPost
Though they have similar touch-points – they look at the treatment of foreign women in Qatar – they are doing vastly different things editorially. The HuffPost piece is largely picking up on the reporting of other outlets such as the New York Times and BBC, sharing a shocking story for its readers.
The Fuller Project, dedicated to reporting that catalyzes change for women, is taking the example of real women the reporter spoke to who have worked in Qatar, and then using those stories to elucidate the broader issue of human rights, and women’s rights in particular, in the country. Even though it doesn’t have the engagement (a republished version on the Guardian also only has fewer than 200 shares), it is still solid reporting worth reading, a hidden gem of a story.
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