Metro Man and Son Heung-min’s Zorro mask named the best fan stories of the first half of World Cup 2022

Doha: Analytics from Smelter.ai, a media monitoring platform, compared two of the most popular headline stories of World Cup 2022 picked up by fans: The ‘Metro Man’ by Abubakr Abbas and Son Heung-min’s Zorro mask. Both stories have gone viral during the last two weeks making their presence in the world press and social media.  The results are as follows.

Smelter.ai states that Abubakr Abbass, a World Cup employee who directed fans to the metro station, received 219 756 interactions in the media in the past two weeks. It is 40 times more than another high resonance story of Son Heung-min’s Zorro mask that only got 5 344 media engagements. 

Abubakr Abbass, 23, born in Mombasa, Kenya. In September this year, he applied for a job at the World Cup to navigate fans. Abubakr guided fans to the metro station near the historic market Souq Waqif using a giant foam hand and a megaphone as he was sitting on top of a tennis-umpire chair. Videos of him showed fans responding to Abbass’ “metro” chants and joining in the fun. His popularity grew so much that even FIFA officials acknowledged his contribution and awarded him gifts. The Metro Guy’s fame further shot up when FIFA officials invited him to a jam-packed stadium before England and the USA game kicked off. On Twitter, ‘ Metro man’ has been mentioned 7621 times, whereas on Youtube received 156 342 engagements, including views, likes, and comments. 

The story went viral on social media and got broad coverage in the press. According to Smelter.ai, Metro Man has been mentioned on the world news 411 times since the 24th of November. World Media that have covered the story include BBC, AlJazeera, Euronews, The Straits Times, RFI, The Indian Express, and others. Some of the headings include: 

Son Heung-min, South Korea national team captain and football hero, recently underwent surgery on a fracture around his eye. He appeared in the match against Uruguay in a protective Zorro-like face mask. South Korean fans greatly supported his bravery and courage, setting up a viral trend in respect to the player. Son Heung-min was engaged on social media 1649 times, and his name has been mentioned in the press 355 times, including DailyMail, The Sun, Eurosport, Independent, The Guardian, Korea Times, and others.

About Smelter

Smelter is a service that collects, analyzes and helps in making conclusions about your brand and your competitors’ brand position in media and social media. Due to the advanced ML and AI algorithms, a wide spectrum of data analytics is available. For instance: – analysis of the brand image in media from different perspectives (e.g. most mentioned by users or needed by you) – analysis of mentions that are coming not only from text source but also from images, videos, audios – analysis of tone in connection to a brand – marking the mentions in case of spam or duplicates. Ai World Cup fan story Ai World Cup fan story