41 Days of World Cup Emotion:
YouTube Sentiment Toward Every National Team
This visualization follows how YouTube discussion around all 48 national teams changed across the 41 days of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Bubble size represents the number of comments mentioning a team, while color represents the balance between positive and negative sentiment. Official match results are aligned to the same daily timeline.
Shareable summary
The visualization
How to read the chart
- Bubble area: the number of analyzed comments mentioning the national team that day.
- Color: the net balance between positive and negative sentiment.
- Match markers: ▲ win, ◆ draw and ▼ loss.
- Blank cells: the team did not enter that day’s ten most-mentioned teams; a blank does not necessarily mean zero discussion.
- Ordering: teams are arranged by their final tournament result and then by total recorded mentions.
Three visible shifts in the tournament
1 Spain’s title created an immediate positive wave
Spain defeated Argentina 1–0 after extra time in the final. In the July 21 snapshot, Spain reached a net sentiment score of +98.6 across 3,872 team mentions. The large blue bubble at the end of Spain’s row captures both the scale of attention and the strongly positive response.
2 Argentina’s sentiment reversed after the final
Argentina’s recorded net sentiment fell by approximately 93 points in one day between July 20 and July 21. This should not be read as a survey of Argentine supporters. Rival fans, neutral viewers, player-specific criticism and the mix of videos appearing in search can all affect the daily result.
3 Korea Republic experienced one of the sharpest swings
Korea Republic moved from +98.4 on June 16 to −96.9 on June 26. The shift illustrates how match outcomes, coaching debates, player criticism and changes in the daily video set can rapidly transform the online environment around a team.
Why are 48 teams shown but only 47 countries searched?
Scotland can still appear as a team mentioned in comments and is included in the visualization. What could not be performed was a dedicated Scotland-region or Scotland-language YouTube search.
How the data was produced
TubeSaku collected World Cup-related YouTube search results across countries each day. The raw collection used the YouTube Data API for search, metadata and comments. Gemini was then used for comment sentiment analysis and short bilingual narration. Published rows were generated from the daily stats.json files used by the public SoccerScope pages.
- Daily snapshots
- 41 rows, one per collection day from June 11 through July 21, 2026.
- Ranked videos
- 783 rows. A video was retained when it appeared in the daily top-by-views and/or top-by-reach rankings.
- Official matches
- All 104 tournament matches, compiled from the FIFA World Cup 2026 Competition Summary, Version 34, published July 19, 2026 at 22:04 UTC.
- Sentiment fields
- Positive, neutral and negative comment counts, together with frequently occurring positive and negative themes.
- Versioning
- The reproducible release is tagged v1.0.0 on Hugging Face and permanently archived through Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21466996.
Important limitations
- This visualization is not a national public-opinion poll. It describes comments in World Cup-related YouTube videos surfaced by the SoccerScope collection process.
- Daily results can be affected by YouTube search behavior, the mix of videos visible that day, multilingual comments, rival supporters and attention to individual players.
- Sentiment and discussion themes were classified with AI and may contain classification or translation errors.
- The same video may appear on multiple collection days. The reported 15,445,999,226 views are views summed across collection days, not unique lifetime views.
- Only the ten most-mentioned national teams are retained in each daily snapshot, so missing team-days must not be interpreted as confirmed zero mentions.
- Underlying YouTube videos, titles, thumbnails and referenced comments remain the property of YouTube and their respective creators. Raw comment text is not published.
The downloadable visualization table contains one row for every combination of 48 tournament teams and 41 collection days. Missing sentiment values mean that the team did not enter that day’s ten most-mentioned teams; they must not be interpreted as confirmed zero mentions.
Data access and related services
Frequently asked questions
What does a blank cell mean?
Does the chart show what each country thinks about its own team?
Why is Scotland included if Scotland was not a search country?
Can the chart and aggregated data be reused?
Citation and reuse
The aggregated statistics, derived analysis and visualization may be reused under CC BY 4.0. Please identify TubeSaku as the dataset provider.
Short attribution
Dataset BibTeX
@dataset{soccerscope_worldcup2026_v1_0_0,
author = {{TubeSaku}},
title = {{SoccerScope: FIFA World Cup 2026 YouTube Trends Dataset}},
year = {2026},
version = {1.0.0},
publisher = {{Zenodo}},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.21466996},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21466996},
note = {{Research and analysis by Webbigdata Live streaming Data Research Institute, operator of TubeSaku.}}
}
CC BY 4.0 applies to the aggregated statistics, derived analysis and this compilation. Match scores and outcomes are factual records compiled from FIFA’s official competition summary. Underlying YouTube content is not relicensed by this project.
About TubeSaku
TubeSaku provides YouTube trend research, creator tools and public datasets. SoccerScope was created and published by Webbigdata Live streaming Data Research Institute, operator of TubeSaku.