Lionel Messi, the Most Popular Player of the 2022 World Cup on Twitter

Analysis by the machine learning company, Pacmann, shows that Lionel Messi was the most popular player of the 2022 World Cup on Twitter. Tweets about the Argentinian player reached 16,386 during the period of November 19th – December 19th, 2022.

Cristiano Ronaldo came in second with a total of 7,007 tweets. Other popular 2022 World Cup players included Kylian Mbappé with 2,981 tweets and Neymar Jr. with 1,176 tweets.

Interestingly, although Karim Benzema did not play in the 2022 World Cup, he made the list of most popular players on Twitter, ranking fifth with 979 tweets during the same period.

Here are the top 10 most popular 2022 World Cup players on Twitter from November 19th – December 19th, 2022:

1. Lionel Messi: 16,386 tweets
2. Cristiano Ronaldo: 7,007 tweets
3. Kylian Mbappé: 2,981 tweets
4. Neymar Jr.: 1,176 tweets
5. Karim Benzema: 979 tweets
6. Dodo: 602 tweets
7. Harry Kane: 557 tweets
8. Robert Lewandowski: 547 tweets
9. Luka Modric: 543 tweets
10. Olivier Giroud: 504 tweets

Pacmann analyzed conversations surrounding the 2022 World Cup on Twitter using machine learning models, namely Named-Entity Recognition and Emotion Analysis.

Named-Entity Recognition analysis was used to detect the popularity of players and teams competing in the 2022 World Cup. This is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task used to extract information such as names, organizations, locations, and times from unstructured datasets like tweets.

Pacmann stated that Twitter was chosen as the analysis medium because the microblogging site was the most active platform discussing the 2022 World Cup. According to Twitter reports, there were over 147 billion impressions from various tweets about the world's biggest football event.

This number surpasses the number of tweets discussing the 2018 World Cup or is more than double the number of tweet impressions about the 2022 Olympics.

Pacmann analyzed approximately 280,000 Indonesian-language tweets on Twitter from November 19th to December 19th, 2022. The analysis was conducted using the keywords 'piala dunia' and 'pildun'.