The World Cup is the gift that keeps on giving (to me).
I was swiping through Instagram Stories during halftime of the Canada vs. Qatar World Cup match when I saw a post about a study about the political indicators of a person’s preference of soccer stars Lionel Messi, the Argentine forward, or Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese striker.
One of the major indicators was the consumption of short-form news video.
Click.
The preprint paper, posted at the end of May, is titled “Political identity beyond politics: The Messi-Ronaldo preference across 26 countries.” Researchers surveyed more than 10,000 adults in 26 countries and found that people who identified as more liberal tended to prefer Messi, while people who considered themselves more conservative prefer Ronaldo.
Another differentiator? People who frequently consumed short-form video news preferred Ronaldo. The consumption of traditional news media, however, wasn’t a significant predictor of either preference.
The finding about short-form video consumption is broader than just “a finding about Messi and Ronaldo,” said Saifuddin Ahmed, the paper’s lead author. (The other authors are Kokil Jaidka and Muhammad Ehab Rasul from the National University of Singapore, and Teresa Gil-López from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid). “It’s a finding about what different distribution environments do to audiences over time, independent of what any individual piece of content says.”
I wasn’t the only person to click on the post; it got millions of views on Instagram Reels and TikToks: “The platform that our data suggest is most associated with Ronaldo preference…became the primary vehicle for disseminating a finding about exactly that,” Ahmed said, continuing, “The algorithm apparently found our research about the algorithm quite shareable.”
I asked Ahmed about what these findings might mean for journalists and the news industry as a whole. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Journalists tend to focus on content on accuracy, on framing, on storytelling. Those things matter enormously. But this study suggests that the environment in which content arrives is also doing work, shaping evaluative tendencies and preference patterns in ways that operate beyond conscious awareness.
The second thing is what the null result for traditional media suggests. It is not a finding that traditional journalism is irrelevant or that audiences who consume it are unaffected by media. It is a finding that the specific mechanism, the algorithmic bundling of political, cultural, and celebrity content in an undifferentiated feed, is something that traditional media does not replicate.
That distinction should prompt some reflection about platform strategy. The question news organizations need to be asking is not just which platforms reach the most people. It is what kind of preference environment those platforms create around journalism’s content, and whether that environment is one where serious reporting can do what it is intended to do.
The third is about the generational dimension. The ideology-preference link in our study is strongest among younger respondents and fades in older adulthood. Those younger cohorts are also the audiences most reachable primarily through short-form platforms.
The two findings together suggest a compounding dynamic, a generation formed inside an algorithmic environment that bundles political and cultural signals together is also the generation whose cultural preferences are most organized by political identity. Whether that is cause or consequence or both is a question the study cannot fully answer. But the directionality is clear enough to warrant urgency in how news organizations think about their relationship with younger audiences and the platforms those audiences inhabit.
I want to be careful not to over-interpret this. A study going viral on TikTok doesn’t confirm its own findings. But there is something worth sitting with in the fact that the algorithm apparently found our research about the algorithm quite shareable. The medium demonstrated the thesis in real time, whether it intended to or not.
The second thing is about what didn’t predict preference, which I think is under-appreciated. Age, gender, education, income, and social class [did not] significantly predict whether someone preferred Messi or Ronaldo after accounting for political ideology and media consumption.
In a world where journalism and social science tend to explain everything through demographic categories, the study found that who you are socially and economically tells you very little about this particular cultural preference. What tells you more is what you value politically and where you consume your media. That is a finding about the limits of demographic explanations that I think has implications well beyond football, for how journalists think about audience segmentation, for how researchers design studies, and for how all of us think about the relationship between social position and cultural taste.
Finally, and this is the thing I most wish more journalists had asked about, the study is a reminder that the effects of media and political identity are not always visible in what people believe or what they know. Sometimes they show up in what people prefer, who they admire, what public figures they feel drawn to. That is a subtler and, in some ways, more pervasive kind of influence than misinformation or partisan framing, precisely because it doesn’t feel like influence. It feels like taste.
And taste, unlike belief, is very hard to correct.
