Recapping our Predictions for the World Cup or Why Floatingsheep rocks!!

Now that the dust has settled after the world cup it is time to reflect on our predictions. Our language sensitive ranking system based on geo-coded references to football/soccer correctly identified three out of the final four countries in the world cup. The only error was predicting England over Germany. Although one can suspect foul play from the English member of the Floatingsheep collective, there is a methodological explanation as well.


Our searches are limited to land, as there are very few placemarks in water. While this works in a general sense, it does exclude references to football by a country's aquatic citizens. While this is miniscule in most cases, the case of Paul the Octopus suggests that Germany may have a sizeable underground (or better phrased, underwater) population of football enthusiasts that were missed in the data.

Or maybe Mark just cooked the data so England would win. Still you could have done much worse if you used our predictions.

After all, using our system we did make about $17,000 dollars via offshore betting. Unfortunately, we have already spent it all on gumdrops, Botox and aquavit. Clearly we're just not cut out for life in the fast lane.

More World Cup Than You Know What To Do With

We're now two weeks and 48 games into the World Cup and transitioning from the opening round to the round of 16. Last week, we gave you our alternative rankings of the sides in this year's World Cup, based on the number of Google Maps references to "football" in each country, as a percentage of the total amount of content.

And while our rankings certainly caused a shake up in terms of where teams stood in the pecking order of the footballing (or is it soccer?) world, they didn't seem to have too much effect on the outcome of the matches themselves. Frankly, it's probably a good thing you didn't bet the farm on our upset pick of South Korea over Argentina (Argentina won that game 4-1). However, were you to have used our rankings to bet on Serbia (#15 by FIFA, #8 by FS) over Germany (#6 by FIFA, #14 by FS) last week, you would have gone away quite rich. Likewise, with just .09% separating them, it's no surprise to the Floatingsheep collective that our #1 and #2 overall teams, Algeria and England, played to a draw.

After recognizing the flaws in our system, however, we've come back with a new way of ranking the sides. Like any map or statistical analysis, we were forced to exclude some things in favor of others, and much to our detriment. Because our original rankings used references only to the term "football", and not local linguistic variations of it, our rankings were highly skewed. For instance, the world's #1 team, Brazil, was ranked dead last of the 32 teams in the World Cup by our rankings.

So we come back with a new set of rankings, based on the local variations on the word "football" - from "calcio" in Italian to "futebol" in Portuguese, we've taken a finer grain approach to our newest series of rankings, seen below.

With these new language-based virtual rankings, a number of countries have improved their position. While Algeria, England and Cameroon remain #1-2-3 in our rankings, traditional football powerhouses Germany, the Netherlands, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Brazil all do substantially better when taking into account their local terms for the game we've all been adjusting our sleep schedules to watch for the last two weeks.

Of course we continue to face methodological issues with this newest set of rankings. Because we don't have a complete set of data including the Arabic, Danish, Greek, Serbian, Slovak and Slovene words for football, we were forced to use the generic "football" for each of these. While Slovenia, Slovakia and Denmark take a hit from this oversight, Algeria, Greece and Serbia have all managed to come through it unscathed, still ranking considerably high, given their disadvantage.

Based solely on picking the team with the higher ranking in our new, language-sensitive ranking system, we're going to make the following predictions for the knockout round portion of this year's World Cup finals:


Although England has the toughest row to hoe in facing the #4 team and, potentially, the #7 team in our rankings, we're going to go ahead and pick our highest ranked team to go ahead and win it all. Based on the matchups, expect #5 Uruguay to make it to the finals, with the Netherlands at #6 edging out the #10 Spaniards for third place.

If you're a betting type and you win big, we'll collect our share at a later time and date. If you happen to lose big, we sincerely hope you won't hold it against us...

Alternate World Cup Rankings

Now that the World Cup is into full swing we figured that we should revisit some of the earlier work that we did on the cybergeographies of football (see here and here). In the table and map below, we've calculated the proportion of all geotagged content in each of the 32 countries competing in the World Cup that mentions the word football.

(click on table for closer view)

And for those more visually inclined, here is the data in map form.

We are able to see that the amount of online interest in football (or more specifically, the propensity of people create content mentioning football tagged to a specific part of the planet) rarely correlates to a country's FIFA ranking. Brazil, for example, which is the top ranked team in the world is at the very bottom of our rankings. Only 0.02% of content in Brazil makes reference to the word football. This is an even lower percentage than North Korea! Of course, our earlier post on the topic did find a lot of content mentioning the Portuguese word futebol so this is almost certainly a linguistic issue.

Will these rankings go on to replace the official FIFA rankings? We'll just have to wait and see. But, it is worthwhile noting that yesterday's unexpected Swiss victory over Spain and the Uruguayan victory over South Africa can both be explained by these cyber-rankings. So we're investing the vast fortune (otherwise known as a deficit) we've made via floatingsheep.org t-shirts on a few side bets. Hmmm...perhaps South Korea to win against Argentina? You heard it here first!

Perhaps most interestingly, Algeria and England are first and second in the rankings (with 2.2% and 2.1% respectively). So, we'll have to see if Algeria live up the their reputation in the cyber-rankings in the match between the two sides tomorrow.

Mapping Takraw

Today's map looks at virtual references to the sport of Takraw. For those that aren't familiar with the sport, it is a cross between association football, volleyball and The Matrix. This clip on YouTube gives a good flavour of what the game is like.

The sport is extremely popular in Southeast Asia, but within the region there is also much debate about the sport's origins. We therefore decided to explore virtual references to the term indexed by Google.


References to Takraw are most visible in Malaysia and Indonesia, with Thailand and the Philippines close behind. Interestingly, the only other place on the planet outside of Southeast Asia that has a significant number of references to the sport is Canada!

Mapping Chicago Sports Teams (or, where do they love Da Bears?)

Everyone knows we love making maps of obscure cultural phenomena. And everyone knows that Chicago loves its sports teams (and when you've got gems like Da Bears skit? and the Super Bowl Shuffle, too? Who couldn't love these teams?!). So why not try to bring these two otherwise unrelated worlds together?

Keeping with a theme set earlier in the week, today we present you with a series of maps showing how the Windy City of Chicago is represented in cyberspace, especially with regards to two of its beloved professional sports teams - the Chicago Cubs and Daaaaa Bears.

All User-Generated Content in Chicago IL

While the map above shows the aggregate of all user-generated Google Maps content in Chicago, the figures below map specific references to "Bears" and "Cubs" within the city.

User-Generated References to "Bears" in Chicago IL

User-Generated References to "Bears" at Soldier Field

At first glance, the map of references to "Bears" doesn't seem particularly informative. That is, unless you're already familiar with the geography of Chicago. But by zooming in to the location with the highest concentration of references, it becomes clear that the most references to "Bears" is, naturally, at the home of Da Bears - Soldier Field.

User-Generated References to "Cubs" in Chicago IL

User-Generated References to "Cubs" at Wrigley Field

Almost the exact same situation arises when we look at references to "Cubs" who, despite having a considerable number of user-generated references at Wrigley Field, have still not won the World Series in over a century. I guess it just goes to show that success in the virtual realm isn't necessarily related to success outside of it.

Football (or is it soccer?) in nine and a half languages

On Monday we created a map illustrating the geography of virtual references to the words "football" and "soccer". In today's post, we've added eight more languages into the mix: German, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Chinese. The map below visualizes which of these various ways of referring to "football" are most visible at any particular location in the Google Maps database.

What struck us most was how the map reproduces expected patterns (based on language groups) with very few exceptions: most points in Korea reference the Korean word for football more than the same word in any other language. The same thing is true in Japan, Thailand, Brazil/Portugal and every other country associated with the languages that we conducted this batch of searches in.

Ultimately, Australia wins the prize for having the most homogeneous footballing cyberscape. There is only one place in the country with a reference to football in a language other than English: A reference to Fussball (German) somewhere around the vicinity of Alpine National Park in Victoria. Perhaps there is some sort of odd colony of football playing Germans (is there any other kind?) in this National Park (would any Aussie readers mind checking up on this for us?).

Sweden and Poland are interesting cases: a diverse mix of references to the sport in English (both "football" and "soccer"), German and Spanish, with a small smattering of Dutch and Portuguese. Of course, if we had searched in Swedish or Polish the results would likely have been otherwise.

English appears to be the dominant language for references to the sport in most parts of the world with no direct connection to one of the languages in which we conducted the search (e.g. in Iran, Finland and Russia). We should also point out the the French word for football is "football," so it is difficult to distinguish between references made in English and French using this keyword.

This map is about more than just a sport. We are interested in using this method to study and map cyberscapes in a range of languages. This map was just a first step to test some of the boundaries of the method. We will eventually be mapping a range of other terms in a lot more languages in the near future. Suggestions are welcome.

p.s. This may be a dagger in the heart of many calcio loving Italians, but despite having won the World Cup four times we simply forgot to do a search in your language. Ci scusiamo. We don't know what we were thinking.

Football vs Soccer

We've decided to wade into an age-old debate. Should football/soccer be called football or soccer? Consulting Wikipedia doesn't really help, as there are twenty one pages of argument debating this very question (they finally settled on the term "association football").

In order to usefully respond to these debates, we figured that we should try to develop a useful understanding of the geography of "football" and "soccer." So our foray into this argument will be through a couple of simple maps. The first shows the relative usage of the word "football," while the second relative usage of the word "soccer."

References to "Football"

References to "Soccer"

Some interesting patterns are evident on these maps. Much of Arabic and Anglopone Africa stands out with a large number of references to both terms (in fact, "football" and "soccer" are some of only a small number terms that we have thus far encountered that have a comparatively high number of hits in Africa). A quick sample of the hits for football and soccer in a few different African cities reveals a range of geographic associations with the terms: bars that show football, soccer pitches, conversations that were had about football, recorded memories of a soccer game that took place, and of course references to the forthcoming World Cup in South Africa. Yet it remains unclear why Libya, Sudan, Tanzania and many other countries on the continent score so highly.

In some cases, a large number of hits for either "football" or "soccer" does seem to be correlated with on-the-pitch successes (either historical or contemporary): see Uruguay and Iraq as examples. Uzbekistan is another interesting example. Surprisingly, the country is home to a relatively large number of virtual references to "football," despite not really being the first country that springs to mind when thinking of the sport (a la Brazil, Germany or England). The country has a low total number of placemarks, but it is likely the relative prominence of FC Bunyodkor (an intriguing case of billionaires, politics, and sky high ambitions) that has sparked a lot of online interest in the footballing side of Uzbekistan.

None of this really helps us resolve the football vs. soccer debate. So we made one final map illustrating the contrast in the number of references to both terms.

What does this map tell us? There are only a few places in the world in which there are more references to soccer than football (Brazil, South Africa, parts of Japan and South Korea, and Canada). Interestingly, Ireland, the US and Australia all refer to association football as "soccer" and yet have far more references to "football." This is likely due to the fact that all three countries play their own regional versions of the sport: Gaelic football, American football, and Australian rules football.

Stay tuned, as our next post will look at how linguistic differences in virtual references to football/soccer in Google Maps are reflective of the differences in language use in the offline world (or perhaps not?).

New York Yankees and Real Madrid

Today brings another look at the geography of interest in sports teams as represented in Google Maps. Note the concentration of references to the New York Yankees in New England. While it might seem strange that there are so many in Boston (home of the Red Sox), it is important to remember that we are simply counting any references to the keyword in question, including negative ones (which surely exist in abundance in Massachusetts).

References to the New York Yankees

And for the rest of the world, we offer a map of references to Real Madrid (a football/soccer team for the unenlightened, NOT some kind of MTV reality show). Apparently they are very popular in the U.A.E. and Spain (although the latter comes as little surprise).

References to Real Madrid

Sometimes it is best (and easiest) to simply let the maps speak for themselves....so that's it.

NCAA Basketball Nations

March Madness is upon us and the Floatingsheep collective has been torn asunder by conflicting team loyalties. Or, to be completely honest, by outright basketball apathy and Taylor's rabid fandom.

In any case, we thought it would be enlightening (or just plain fun) to compare the geography of basketball fandom around the country. Is there truly a Big Blue Nation out there and if so, what does it look like?

Inspiring this question was a map that comes from the Atlas of Kentucky (reproduced here with permission) that shows the distribution of men's basketball season ticket holders for the University of Kentucky (located in Fayette County) and the University of Louisville (located in Jefferson County). The differences between these patterns are quite striking with UK season ticket holders located throughout the commonwealth while Louisville fans are predominantly located in Louisville and the immediately surrounding areas.

UK and U of L Season Ticket Holders

We took Floatingsheep's collective wisdom about the teams most likely to make it to the final eight (no comment on how this compares to reality) and searched for the following eight keyword combinations within Google Maps at points within the United States. No doubt, fans of the underdog Butler Bulldogs may feel slighted by these choices, but who really predicted that they'd have made it this far? As for the Duke Blue Devils? We're still a little bitter over this whole thing (and this part, too).

• Kansas AND Jayhawks AND basketball
• "Kansas State" AND Wildcats AND basketball
• Kentucky AND Wildcats AND basketball
• "Michigan State" AND Spartans AND basketball
• "Ohio State" AND Buckeyes AND basketball
• Syracuse AND Orange AND basketball
• Villanova AND Wildcats AND basketball
• "West Virginia" AND Mountaineers AND basketball

Placemarks needed to contain the university's name, its mascot and the term basketball in order to be recorded. Each point in the U.S. was then assigned which ever team's search result produced the most hits and is displayed in the map below. (We zoomed into the central to eastern portion of the U.S. since that is where all of the teams are headquartered.)

NCAA Basketball Nations

The results are actually quite striking. Michigan State's and Ohio State's nations are clearly headquartered within their states, although Michigan State seems to enjoy greater popularity throughout the Midwest. Kentucky's nation is centered within the Commonwealth and spreads into the south. Likewise, West Virginia's fan base seems to stretch along the Appalachian Mountains and Villanova's region is centered directly on the school.

The most far reaching fan base is that of the Syracuse Orange, although we suspect that since its mascot is also a color, the map may overstate extent of their popularity. That being said, the concentration of orange dots in New England makes perfect sense.

The most interesting comparison, however, is between Kansas State Wildcats and the University of Kansas, a contest clearly dominated by Kansas State, with the exception of the area immediately surrounding the KU campus in Lawrence. Hopefully this doesn't foretell another round of Bloody Kansas, but with nationalism it's always hard to tell. And aren't basketball allegiances the closest thing to ethnic identities, anyway?