The FIFA World Cup is (without doubt) the largest sporting event worldwide. The fact that it’s only done once every four years makes it even more exciting. As in most of Europe, Latin Americans are crazy about the sport.

The day the cup was over we launched a (rather large) survey where we interviewed around 9,000 people in 10 different (World Cup participating) countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Spain and Portugal.

First thing we wanted to find out was if people bought a new TV for the world cup. The results were quite consistent across Latin America (averaging 20%) but rather different from Spain and Portugal, were only 9% and 4% respectively told us they bought a new TV.

We can find a few explanations for this:

• Spain and Portugal played in the European cup in 2008 and people may have already bought new TVs then.
• Also, LCD TVs are already mainstream in Europe.
• People in Europe watch football matches in public spaces much more than in Latin America where matches are watched in private houses.
• The economic crisis in Spain and Portugal is still ongoing.

We were also interested in what type of TV people bought, although the overwhelming majority bought LCDs, we found that in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay more than 10% bought traditional CRT TVs.

And what about High Definition (HD)? These are the percentages of interviewed people that subscribed to a new cable or satellite service in order to watch the cup in HD:

We also asked if they watched at least one match in HD, results are quite similar across the board:

The World Cup is traditionally leveraged by brands and advertisers to push their products. Every beer, soft drink, sport drink, shoe, mobile phone and TV maker seems to get really patriotic around this time (no matter what country they are from). We asked people how they felt about this, although the results in Latin America were similar across the board (with most people finding the ads amusing/entertaining), Spanish and Portuguese don’t find this as funny…

Finally, one of the biggest controversies of this World Cup. Should FIFA introduce technology to assist referees in difficult decisions? Well, an overwhelming majority says. Especially in Brazil, Mexico and Portugal where well over 80% of people said yes. Argentines are actually the least enthusiastic about this (which is not a surprise given how much referee errors, I mean “divine” intervention, has helped us over the years):

What do you think? What is your take on these results? We would love to hear from you.