If you didn’t watch the 2024 Leagues Cup Final this past weekend, you missed an all-time classic. In a rematch of the 2023 MLS Cup Final, Columbus Crew defeated Los Angeles Football Club 3-1 in Columbus. It is the Crew’s first Leagues Cup trophy and the second trophy of the Wilfried Nancy era.
But you know us. We want to go beyond the scoreline and on-the-field action, so we analyzed fan behavior around the Leagues Cup through three lenses:
- What helps drive social media engagement
- Where are searches for the tournament coming from
- What effect did a Messi-less tournament have on social engagements
In a perfect world, viewership of games would be a fourth area of review; however, Apple doesn’t release streaming numbers. So, with that being said let’s dive into all things Leagues Cup 2024.
Club América’s popularity drives engagement
Club América is one of the most popular teams in Mexico—and North America for that matter—and this popularity shined through when analyzing engagement and trending behavior around Leagues Cup.
Three of the four days Leagues Cup was searched for most on Google came the day after América games (Aug. 10, 14, 18) with trending behavior significantly decreasing after América’s elimination from the tournament on August 17.
Note: the embedded graph may not populate if you use Safari as your browser. To view, click here.
This theme continues when looking at engagements on the official tournament social accounts across the entirety of the tournament. Look specifically at August 9 and 13, which have the second- and third-most engagements on Leagues Cup content. What happened these days? You guessed it—América played.
August 3 provided the most engagements and the highest average engagements per post in any single day throughout the tournament. It’s likely no surprise then that one of the most-engaged-with pieces of Leagues Cup content was posted on this day—a Facebook video of this wonder-goal by Tigres midfielder Juan Brunetta against Inter Miami.
Hispanic cities drove high search volume
Above we shared the Google search volume over the course of the tournament. To add some additional context to this info, below is a map highlighting the regions with highest search volume.
While it defaults to the “Subregion” (states) view, if you change the view to “City,” you’ll more clearly see the point we’re making here, which is that areas of the country with a high percentage of Hispanic population drove search volume for the tournament.
Note: the embedded graph may not populate if you use Safari as your browser. To view, click here.
Check out the Hispanic population percentages for the 10 cities with the highest search volume at time of publishing. With the exception of outlier Los Alamos, NM, each of the other nine cities is at least 71% Hispanic.
- Lynwood, CA: 88%
- Huntington Park, CA: 97%
- Compton, CA: 71%
- Salinas, CA: 80%
- Oxnard, CA: 76%
- South Gate, CA: 95%
- Combes, TX: 87%
- Los Alamos, NM: 17%
- Jurupu Valley, CA: 72%
- Laredo, TX: 96%
Given the tournament pits the best teams of Mexico against the best of the U.S. and Canada, it’s no surprise a lot of the tournament’s search volume came from heavy-Hispanic cities within relatively close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Comparing the 2023 & 2024 tournaments
How does engagement with the 2024 Leagues Cup compare to 2023’s inaugural edition? The differences we see between the two can be boiled down to one word: Messi.
While rumors of his MLS arrival were confirmed in June, his first game with Inter Miami was on July 21, 2023 against Cruz Azul in Inter Miami’s first Leagues Cup game. The eyes of the soccer world were always going to be on North America when Messi decided to go to South Beach, but his Miami career taking off in Leagues Cup was monumental for the upstart tournament.
Additional insight: if you compare the number of global media mentions of last year’s tournament, the total is 3x more than this year’s total global media mentions. The Messi effect is, in fact, very real.
It’s easy to tell when Messi and Inter Miami played in the 2023 Leagues Cup as nearly every single uptick in engagements occur on Inter Miami game days. The tournament also benefited from Inter Miami’s deep run to the title as more Messi meant more eyeballs.
But this doesn’t mean the 2024 Messi-less version of Leagues Cup was any less successful. In fact, just the opposite, as the second chart above illustrates.
We recognize this experiment has its flaws, but just for the sake of comparison—if you take away Inter Miami and Messi and replace their 2023 game day engagements with the average social engagements on non-Inter Miami days, there are several days where the 2024 tournament is on par with or ahead of the 2023 tournament in total daily engagements.
Unlike last year, the 2024 Leagues Cup saw no Liga MX team advance past the quarterfinals. As we alluded to above, the loss of América certainly lowered the social engagement ceiling.