Novice

We got a huge number of replies – in fact this turned out to be the largest survey ever made about football – and a number of interesting results.

It probably does not come as a great surprise that the darling team of world football is Brazil – 54 percent out of 196,000 Hattrick users hold them as the favourites to win this year’s World Cup. 17 percent have Brazil as their most favourite team of all, with the Netherlands as the second most popular with 9 percent. Does everyone love Brazil? Well, no… regional rivalries count for a lot in this survey, and this is especially evident in the case of Brazil and Argentina.

The biggest Brazil lovers are the Swiss – who actually prefer Brazil to win the World Cup over their own national team, even though they are also in the competition!

The average Hattrick user plans on spending 2 to 3 hours a day watching the World Cup, while users in Mexico, Poland and Argentina set aside between 3 to 5 hours a day to watch the games. Northern Europeans – with England leading the charge – are the most prepared to sacrifice family time in order to follow the World Cup. 43 percent of the English feel the World Cup is the top priority in June and July.

An interesting question was fans’ position on fair play – what good is it if it prevents your team from winning games? Polish fans (66%) and Portuguese fans (57%) are least tolerant towards their own players cheating on the pitch to get an advantage. Most tolerant are the Dutch and the Swedes. It’s probably less of a surprise that Swedes really don’t mind their team playing boring and uninspiring football, as long as their team wins – only 25 % rate quality of play as more important than winning. The Finns and the Belgians (at 59%) are the foremost connoisseurs in modern football - although they probably overdid that a bit in the qualifying stages. Neither of those teams made it to the World Cup finals!

We would like to thank you all for participating in our football survey, which we dubbed the Global Football Monitor. As it happens, this was the largest survey ever carried out about football, and the results of the survey managed to make the headlines in many countries around Europe. Feel free to check out the complete results of the Monitor on our minisite, http://www.globalfootballmonitor.com.

We should also say that, as you know, the main reason for the big survey we did was not to ask about the World Cup but to ask about your views on Hattrick. This survey was similarly big and successful, but it was also more complex. We are busy analyzing it and will report back to you with the results as soon as we can.

Once again, many thanks for taking part – and enjoy the real World Cup!