2022 will be the year Lionel Messi is marked by his success in winning the 2022 World Cup trophy he has been waiting for. In cyberspace, La Pulga also made a record with the record for the most likes on Instagram.
Argentina's journey in this grand football tournament began with a defeat at the hands of the Saudi Arabian team. This undermined the Albiceleste's previous unbeaten record so pessimism emerged that it would win.
But apparently, Argentina managed to advance to the final, where at the top of the party they managed to frustrate France to win the World Cup trophy in a row. This trophy for Argentina is very meaningful because it has been awaited since the last championship in 1986 during the era of Diego Maradona.
In this event, Lionel Messi's role was irreplaceable with 7 goals and 3 assists which made him the best player in this edition of the World Cup.
The moment Messi was paraded while lifting the 2022 World Cup trophy became the most liked post on Instagram. Messi uploaded it along with other photos of the celebration.
It is known that the previous world record for likes on Instagram was a viral photo of an egg from the @world_record_egg account. This photo has 58.7 million likes since it was posted on January 5, 2019. And, it is the only post on the account.
Initially, this egg photo was a movement on social media to beat the record for likes from Kylie Jenner's photo with 18 million likes. Since then, this mediocre and absurd egg photo has topped the world record for likes.
And now, the record for likes on Instagram goes to Lionel Messi's post with the 2022 World Cup trophy. Based on our monitoring on Sunday (1/1/2022) this post has been liked by 74.2 million and has the potential to continue to grow.
Argentina and Lionel Messi
At the same time, Twitter released interesting data about the 2022 World Cup which had just ended, where Argentina and Lionel Messi were the most poked at by netizens.
There were as many as 147 billion conversations that took place at the 2022 World Cup, which surpassed that of a similar event four years ago or the 2018 World Cup. Even compared to the Tokyo 2022 Olympics, this is twice as high.
Of the 64 matches that took place in the soccer tournament, the final which brought together Argentina vs France became the most discussed by netizens.
Twitter describes the five footballers most mentioned by users, starting from Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe, Neymar Jr, Cristiano Ronaldo and Son Heung-min.
Meanwhile, from national teams, Argentina was the most mentioned followed by Brazil, France, Portugal and Croatia.
Startup Pacmann also released interaction data for Twitter users. A total of 280 thousand Indonesian-language tweets occurred on Twitter during the period November 19 to December 19 2022, with the keywords "world cup" and "pildun".
Pacmann's first analysis is to apply Named-Entity Recognition to detect the popularity of players and teams competing in these major soccer tournaments.
In short, Named-Entity Recognition is one of the tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is used to extract information such as name, organization, location, time, and so on from a collection of unstructured datasets such as tweets.
Based on the results of an analysis using the Named-Entity Recognition model, it was revealed that Lionel Messi was the most popular player during the 2022 World Cup with twice as many tweets as the second most popular player Cristiano Ronaldo.
The next most popular player positions are occupied by Kylian Mbappé and Neymar Jr. Interestingly, Karim Benzema is also the fifth most popular player even though he has not even played in this competition.
Meanwhile, regarding the most popular country team on Twitter during the 2022 World Cup, of course Argentina came out as champion. The South American country has now collected three world cup titles.
Then, the second and third most popular teams are Portugal and Croatia. Another interesting thing from this year's World Cup is Morocco, one of the underdog teams who occupy the position of the fourth most popular team for their achievements in reaching the semifinals.