Move aside football, soccer (that’s, err, football to everyone else) and the FIFA World Cup in South Africa is proving more popular in the US than expected.
Data from country sites belonging to metasearch engine Skyscanner reveals a surprising number of flight searches to South Africa from the US before and during the global extravaganza which begins later this month.
Not known for its widespread enthusiasm for the round ball game, despite hosting the tournament in 1994, searches for flights from the US to South Africa have increased by 440% on the same period in 2009.
Skyscanner’s table of the top ten most eager fans:
- USA – 440%
- Spain – 409%
- Brazil – 399%
- France – 331%
- Australia – 308%
- Portugal – 272%
- Germany – 250%
- Netherlands – 226%
- England – 206%
- Italy – 134%
Many people don’t realize the popularity of soccer in the US. There are about 30m serious soccer fans in the US. That is only about 10% of the population of the US but about 60% of the population of England.
It is also a very popular sport to play at every level of competition up to the professional level.
This would be an amazing stat if the strong majority of these US based soccer fans supported the USA. Let’s hope it’s the case. Good luck to our boys in South Africa! Go USA!!!
This is yet another example of how statistics can tell you any truth you want to hear.
On normal days, there are a lot more more Brits travelling to South Africa than American. for the sake of argument, lets say that in June 2009 there were 3,000 Americans and 30,000 Brits traveling to South Africa.
Multiplying the above percentages by this number you get about 13,000 Americans and 63,000 Brits going to see the World Cup. Is it more American or Brits.
When looking for a number of visitors for a specific event, there is nothing less meaningful than comparing the increase rate, without knowing the baseline.
Never trust statistics without carefully examining it.