By Tim Lesnik, Product Manager

Move over Lionel Messi. Move over Cristiano Ronaldo: here in Oslo we’ve been breaking a few records of our own.

Hot on the heels of Messi becoming the all-time leading goalscorer at men’s World Cups, and Ronaldo becoming the first player to score in six men’s World Cups, the tournament is pushing Opera’s mobile products to new sporting heights.

For the first time in our history, we have 10 million daily active users viewing football scores on the start pages of Opera for Android and Opera Mini. For context, that’s 9,999,996 more daily active users than Erling Haaland has World Cup goals, although the gap is admittedly narrowing extremely quickly.

This new milestone shows how the World Cup resonates with more casual football fans, keen to stay up-to-date with the scores. Users aren’t exactly stopping at the scoreboard carousel either. They’re going deeper, into the built-in scores sections in Opera for Android and Opera Mini. We’ve seen a 70% increase in visitors on Opera for Android compared to the levels seen during the English Premier League season. That figure stands at 58% for Opera Mini.

Not content with just the score, the World Cup is prompting our users to seek out goal alerts, match stats, match commentary, line-ups, group tables and video highlights in ever-greater numbers.

One reason for this increased engagement is convenience. Users can check scores instantly from within Opera Mini and Opera for Android without downloading a separate app, while still getting the rich features of a standalone app. 

Add in the integrated newsfeed, giving direct access to the best World Cup content available and the pattern is clear – pushes for our World Cup content are getting significantly better click-through rates than for all other topics.

This World Cup effect was immediate: the most-followed match of the tournament so far has been the curtain-opener between Mexico and South Africa. It also drew the most audio commentary listens, a sign that the first whistle still pulls an outsized crowd. 

But old habits die hard. While the World Cup is certainly capturing people’s attention, allegiances to club teams remain strong.

In the days leading up to and immediately following the start of the tournament, we saw a surge in the number of users who were choosing favourite teams, locking themselves in to receiving updates about future matches involving those clubs and national sides.

Rather than choose teams playing in the World Cup, Opera Mini users – heavily concentrated in Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia and India, whose national teams did not qualify – were more likely to pick their own national team or a club side. In fact, England is the only team in the top ten most followed teams actually competing in the World Cup. The rest are either non-qualifying nations or club sides, underlining just how strongly fans identify with club sides year-round.

Opera for Android’s crowd leans European and South American, so it’s Brazil, Argentina and Portugal at the top – more tournament-centric than Opera Mini users. 

Rank	Most-followed teams on Opera for Android	Most-followed teams on Opera Mini
1	Brazil	Nigeria
2	Argentina	Manchester United
3	Portugal	Real Madrid
4	England	Bangladesh
5	Turkey	Barcelona
6	Barcelona	Kenya
7	Real Madrid	England
8	France	Manchester City
9	Manchester United	Chelsea
10	PSG	Arsenal

Nevertheless, expect more records to be broken when the domestic season resumes in August, with English and Spanish clubs teams already dominating the rankings on both products. It’s not too soon to be thinking about that, is it?

footballLive ScoresmobileOpera for Androidopera mini

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