8 charts that show you what Asia really thinks of the World Cup

Here are eight things about Asia's interest in the World Cup that you might not have known:

1. “But I’ve always supported Deutschland”

These countries in Asia suddenly wanted to know about German flags. Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia were searching for the topic of German flags more intensely than Germany.

Searches for “flag of Germany” over the past 12 months in Asia

2. Indonesia searches for (almost) everybody

Here’s a chart showing Asia’s search interest in Germany. Indonesia’s one of the top countries.

This is a chart showing Asia’s search interest in Argentina. Nepal and Bangladesh are searching for the Argentina team the most. But Indonesia’s number three.

Now note Asia’s search interest in the Netherlands. And note Indonesia again.

And here’s Asia’s search interest in Brazil, which is in general higher than for the other teams in the final four. Yes, there’s Indonesia in third place.

3. Asia’s just not that into Asian teams

Japan and South Korea have the most search interest for South Korea. The rest of Asia? Not so much.

Asia’s search interest in South Korea’s team in the past 90 days

The world’s search interest in Japan’s team over the past 90 days

4. India’s just not that into football

If you think the U.S. is the country that cares the least about football (sorry, soccer), think again. India takes the top spot for shrugging its shoulders at the world’s most popular sport.

5. When it comes to injuries, incurred beats inflicted

Both Suarez’s bite and Neymar’s vertebra injury triggered a swarm of searches, but there were more searches for the Brazilian star’s back-breaking incident than even Suarez’s toothy foul that inspired everything from memes to bottle openers.

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6. Classiest meme? World-Cup Tang poetry parody

Poems supposedly written by Chinese Tang dynasty poets Li Bai and Du Pu are trending when netizens rewrote them to make an acrostic that spelled out “Brazil suffers huge defeat in 2014”. Actually the poems were not written by Tang poets at all, but by football fans online who are waxing lyrical.

The line in blue is for the name of the poem “Touring Sichuan”; the line in red is for “Brazil”.

Searches for this poem actually spiked above searches for Brazil at one point last week in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

7. J-Lo, watch out for J-Ro

Golden Boot winner James Rodriguez, the striker from Colombia, trended across Asia. Taiwan’s netizens named him J羅, pronounced “J-Luo.” We can call him J.Ro though. Popularity for J.Ro has shot up past that of J.Lo globally. But even the Taiwanese nickname for Rodriguez is suddenly beating the global nickname for Jennifer Lopez.

8. Causation? Correlation?

Paul the Octopus was credited with picking winners. Mick Jagger got blamed for backing losers. The country with the third-highest interest in Paul the Octopus was India (which is amazing, given 4).

We've put together a public spreadsheet of the charts and data in this blog post for you to create your own versions.

Posted by Robin Moroney, Communications Manager, Google Asia Pacific