Argentina Becomes the Most Popular World Cup 2022 Team on Twitter

Based on analysis by the machine learning company Pacmann, Argentina was the most popular national team on Twitter during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Argentina's popularity on Twitter soared after the team won the 2022 World Cup from France, the 2018 champion.

Argentina's popularity is evident in the high number of tweets about the team: 23,762 tweets between November 19 and December 19, 2022.

The second and third most popular national teams on Twitter were Portugal and Croatia, with 16,698 and 9,580 tweets respectively during the same period.

Morocco, an underdog team that reached the semi-finals for the first time, was the fourth most popular team on Twitter, with 8,067 tweets.

France, the World Cup runner-up, did not make the top 10 most popular teams this year. Les Bleus ranked 18th with 1,578 tweets.

Here are the top 10 most popular national teams on Twitter based on the number of tweets from November 19 to December 19, 2022:

1. Argentina: 23,762 tweets
2. Portugal: 16,698 tweets
3. Croatia: 9,580 tweets
4. Morocco: 8,067 tweets
5. Brazil: 7,704 tweets
6. Germany: 6,919 tweets
7. Poland: 6,047 tweets
8. England: 5,504 tweets
9. Spain: 4,556 tweets
10. Japan: 4,293 tweets

"It's interesting that Brazil, considered the most likely champion, was less popular than Morocco," said Valiance Cahya Amalinadhi Putra, an instructor and data scientist at Pacmann, as quoted from the company's website on Friday (December 23rd).

"Our mathematical model for World Cup predictions last month indicated that Brazil, Argentina, and France were the three most likely champions," he continued.

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

Named-Entity Recognition 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 analyzed approximately 280,000 Indonesian-language tweets on Twitter from November 19 to December 19, 2022, using the keywords 'piala dunia' and 'pildun' (Indonesian for World Cup).