New research shows that searches for travel and food have increased following Morocco’s surprise performance at the 2022 World Cup.

Nearly forty years ago, Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie threw a game-winning touchdown pass from midfield to surprise the University of Miami on the final play of the game, sparking a surge in enrollment for the school in what has become known as the “Flutie Effect.”

Researchers have now found evidence of this effect beyond the football field and at track and field events.

During and after Morocco’s surprise run to the semi-finals of the 2022 World Cup in the fall of 2022, online searches for non-sports topics related to Morocco increased by 400%. This included increases in global search volumes related to the country’s cuisine, culture and attractions with queries such as “best time to visit Morocco”, “Morocco visa” and “couscous”.

Furthermore, an analysis of global online sentiment towards Morocco, as expressed on social media, showed that feelings towards the country went from almost neutral in the month leading up to the World Cup to an almost 150% increase in positive sentiment during the month-long competition.

“Morocco has not only had a remarkable run in the World Cup, but has also created a compelling narrative for itself that has captured global attention and generated remarkable interest in the country – in ways that were neither expected nor previously appreciated,” said Anasse Bari, a clinical associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Science and the study’s lead author, who wrote on IEEE Exploration.

Researchers have studied the effect of sport on the image of countries, often in an Olympic context. Less well understood, however, is the impact of athletic success on broader interest in a particular country.

To measure this, Bari, who was born and raised in Tangier, and his colleagues created Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to measure the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) embedded in English-language news articles about Morocco before (October 19, 2022 to November 19, 2022) and during (November 20, 2022 to December 18, 2022) the World Cup—a commonly used method to gauge the tone of news coverage. Sentiment was almost “neutral” before the World Cup, but positive sentiment grew by almost 150% during the tournament.

The surge in positive attention wasn’t surprising given the team’s extraordinary and unexpected performance. But did it have an impact off the field?

To investigate this question, the researchers created a series of “Morocco indices” designed to measure interest in the country and in the World Cup team separately. In addition to a “Country Index,” these include a “Jersey Index” to track searches for player shirts, a “YouTube Index” to capture searches for match highlights, and a “Tourism Index” to measure interest in travel and cuisine (for example, by pairing “Morocco” with keywords such as “visa” and “flights”).

These indices were linked to public Reddit posts in English about Morocco before, during, and after the World Cup, which Morocco will co-host in 2030. Specifically, the researchers designed a framework that captured both popularity and sentiment effects from three time periods: 30 days before the World Cup, the 30-day period in which the World Cup took place, and 30 days after the World Cup.

As expected, searches specifically related to the World Cup increased during the competition, but so did searches related to travel (“Rabat” and “Casablanca” saw significant increases in popularity) and food. Notably, couscous and tagine retained greater popularity in Moroccan cuisines after the World Cup ended, with couscous increasing by over 90% compared to its pre-World Cup popularity, followed by tagine with an 81% increase.

More specifically, Morocco’s victory over Portugal, which marked its historic breakthrough to the semi-finals, was the peak of popularity with a massive 4,527% increase in mentions. Words semantically related to “Moroccan” shot up 3,758% during the World Cup compared to the previous period.

Additionally, several related terms began trending on Reddit during the World Cup; these included “Morocco Travel”, “Morocco Food”, and “Morocco Capital”. While the popularity of most of these terms declined following the World Cup, topics related to “Morocco Travel” in particular saw an increased attention rate of 2,356% compared to the period during the competition.

“While we don’t know whether the success of the World Cup actually boosted tourism — there is no public data available on tourism in Morocco — it has certainly generated interest in the country that goes beyond just sports,” said Bari, who leads the Courant Institute’s Predictive Analytics and AI Research Lab.

“Morocco’s success in 2022 certainly influenced FIFA’s decision to make them co-hosts of the 2030 World Cup. But we now know that the team’s run has paid off in unforeseen ways.”

Source: New York University