The World Cup not only brings surprising sporting results but also breaks records in terms of interest. That's according to data from Flashscore, whose websites and apps were visited by more than 116 million people during November. The world's leading provider of instant sports coverage recorded the best month in its more than 15-year history.
"We weren't too happy about the decision to move the date of the tournament to when the autumn football season normally peaks. For us, the league rounds of major football competitions are crucial and because of Qatar, fans missed out on several of them," explains Patrik Dzurenda, co-CEO of Livesport, the company behind Flashscore.
However, the fears of the company, which offers to its users a unique mix of news coverage during the World Cup, including statistical analysis, visualizations of match data, multimedia content, expert blogs and live audio commentary from all matches, have not been seen.
"Five weekends in October had brought us a new record, 106 million users. But November exceeded our biggest expectations. We've never seen anything like this because the World Cup is always played after the end of the football season," Dzurenda adds. "Now the combination of club football and the biggest sporting event has proved to work, bringing all types of fans to us in one month. As a result, we have seen a 22 percent year-on-year increase in traffic and we have pushed the recent record to 116 million users".
The unprecedentedly high global interest in the Qatar tournament is confirmed by data from Google Trends. The peak search for the phrase "World Cup" during the last World Cup is at 70 percent of the value from this year's tournament.
"Our global Flashscore network has a local version in more than 40 countries and November was a record-breaking month for roughly half of them. The ranking of the most-watched matches in our history has also changed a lot. Until the start of the World Cup, last year's Champions League match between Manchester United and Young Boys Bern was in the first place. Today, it's not even in the Top 25. The new record holder is Argentina's surprise defeat to Saudi Arabia which has been viewed by more than 14 million fans on Flashscore," says Patrik Dzurenda.
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