World Cup Starting XI: Twitter All-Stars

The Russia 2018 World Cup is here! We have a jam packed month ahead full of great games, goals, surprises, and drama. The World Cup is the most widely viewed sporting event and its teams and players are ready for the stage that comes once every four years. Thirty-two teams from across the globe competing; 736 athletes in the world spotlight; and hundreds of millions of followers on social media keeping up with the World Cup, teams, and players.

And that’s where we come in. Here at Blinkfire Analytics we are passionate about social media and soccer, so we put together our own starting XI of players who had the most engagement on Twitter during May. The lineup includes more offensive players and goal strikers, but at least we have a goalie in de Gea.

The MVP (Most Valuable Profile)

Cristiano Ronaldo (surprise, surprise) is at the very top of the engagement numbers. The Portuguese star is not only the most followed player on Twitter, but also the one with the highest average engagement and average value per tweet.

Liverpool and Egypt star Mohamed Salah is another interesting case. The attacker is the 12th player in terms of followers, but he’s the second one in terms of engagement. He received 128,000 engagements per tweet on average.

If we take a look at players like James Rodríguez and Luis Suárez, we can see how they have a large following on Twitter (more than 10 million followers in both cases), but their engagement numbers are surpassed by players with fewer followers. Last month James Rodriguez earned 535,000 engagements and Luis Suárez received 327,000, while Germany’s Toni Kroos, with only 6.8 million followers, had more than one million engagements.

Most active players…on Twitter

The 26 players in the graph below posted, on average, 25 tweets in May. The outlier of the group was Mohamed Elneny. The Arsenal and Egypt gunner posted 49 times on Twitter with 12,000 engagements per tweet on average.

On the other end of the spectrum we have PSG’s Kylian Mbappé and Chelsea’s Eden Hazard, who only posted three times on Twitter in May, although each player had very different results. The French forward had an average of 158,000 engagements per tweet, while the Belgian player received only 5,000 engagements.

In May our very own Twitter national team received more than 20 million engagements, and their posts had an earned media valued of $15 million. During the next month we’ll see if Blinkfire’s starting XI continues their Twitter activity as they travel and compete in the World Cup, but one thing is for sure — the tens of million of social media followers will certainly be watching.