July 16, 2018 - Croatia is a global hit, with record media coverage due to the World Cup. Croatian media monitoring service, Mediatoolkit, has been charting the huge surge of interest.
It first started with the quarter-final win over Russia. Mediatoolkit, one of my very favourite Croatian companies, posted some data on the Internet's interest in Croatia's victory.
As one part of the range of instant online services they offer, Mediatoolkit tracks mentions of a particular keyword in real time. Following the victory against Croatia, there were three times more mentions for the keyword 'Croatia' that the last three years combined in the international media. Quite a show of interest over just one football match.
When Croatia went on to beat England in the semi-finals, that number was surpassed, and, as you can see from the photo above, the World Cup Final brought record mentions of this tiny country which dared to dream.
Tomislav Grubisic, CEO of Mediatoolkit, published this chart on his Facebook page this morning, with some more interesting information. Who was the more popular, captain Luka Modric who went on to collect the Golden Ball as the best player in the tournament, or Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, who stood in the rain as the only umbrella was given to President Putin, and she hugged all around her and even got to hold and kiss the World Cup trophy.
According to Grubisic's data, there were 25% more mentions of the Croatian president than the Croatian captain. And with so many people writing about Modric and he was not even the most popular topic, it is clear that the name of Croatia went into every corner of the globe.
