The World Cup captures the attention of 3 billion people. The tournament is expected to increase global ad spend by $2.4 billion this year as global corporations look to use the tournament as a way to increase brand recognition and reputation. Yet, the nature of live sports makes it impossible to predict what’s going to happen. Communications teams can try as hard as possible to plan for everything, but there will always be one incident they can’t predict (who saw the “Hand of God” coming?) but want to capitalize on. Problem is, they have little data to analyze.

Zignal Discover searches the entire history of Twitter in real-time, so comms teams can react to media moments such as the viral scenes of the Japanese fans cleaning the stadium after their game. Here are some other findings from the World Cup using Zignal Discover for instant search.

Football’s Coming Home (at least in England)

England fans have not been more excited about their chances at winning a World Cup since they last claimed the title back in 1966. Fans have adopted the slogan “Football’s Coming Home” (based off a song from 1998) as an enthusiastic way to show faith in this year’s team. When isolating Tweets to a particular country in Discover, we see daily usage of the hashtag has constantly been increasing in England and the number of mentions peaked after their opening game against Panama. But any hopes of American fans jumping on the England bandwagon appear fruitless. Mentions for the two hashtags in the United States haven’t eclipsed 1,500 daily mentions.

No One Feels Sorry for Germany According to Emojis

The Germans, the team who haven’t exited in the group stages of a World Cup since 1936 and has won the tournament four times, are out. And people seem pretty happy about it. Because you can use Discover to conduct emoji searches, we looked at mentions for Germany in conjunction with two popular emojis—tears of sadness vs. tears of joy— and the latter wins in a landslide. It seems everyone hates a winner.

Ronaldo: The GOAT?

This World Cup has already seen some absolute wonder goals from the top players in the world. Out of the lot, it appears Christiano Ronaldo’s hat-trick against Spain (including a game-tying free kick in the 89th minute that left the keeper staring in awe) was the most popular on Twitter. When we compared Ronaldo top footballers such as Tony Kroos, Philippe Coutinho, Nacho and Jess Lingard, the performance earned 70,000 mentions on the day of the game, 25,000 more than any of the shooters in contention for goal of the tournament.

Brands want to leverage these viral events and move toward an agile content creation cycle—when done in the right way, a campaign can humanize a brand and improve their standing with their target audience. They just need a way to examine the data to decide which event is best for their brand. With Discover, there are endless ways to examine it.

If you would like to see Zignal Discover in action, click here to request a demo.