SA’s popular soccer stadiums, according to Google searches

With just over  one hundred days to go until the FIFA World Cup™, soccer fever is taking over South Africa. The excitement is not only about soccer but also the venues where the games are going to be played. In the past few months, new stadiums, each shinier and more ‘state of the art’ than the last, have been commissioned, but the jury is still out on which one the masses favour.  If you haven’t seen what any of these stadiums look like inside, the Google Trike has been to Moses Mabhida Stadium and you can see the footage below.  We’ve looked at which stadium is the people’s favourite, the Google way of course, by ranking the top 5 stadiums in terms of international search popularity over the past 12 months.

In terms of the geographical origins of the searches for the most popular stadiums, there have been some surprises. In the graphic below, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States, Zimbabwe and Zambia dominate the searches for the most popular stadium, Soccer City.  Interestingly in Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Kenya lead the ticket sales across the continent but do not feature in the top ten of countries searching for key World Cup venues. We can also see from the graphic that when the draw took place in December, searches for stadiums spiked as football fans from around the world looked for more information on where their favourite teams would be playing.

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Zeitgeist Explained
Google reveals the internet “Zeitgeist” (German for “the spirit of the times”) through an exploration of the billions of search queries we receive each year. We also have several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends. Google Zeitgeist tools can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over time. These tools are available year-round for you to play with, explore, and learn from.  You can create your own lists and rankings on www.google.com/zeitgeist