From stupid punts to cheeky stunts: Paddy Power's editorial team reflect on the World Cup
It’s not exactly been a quiet four weeks.
A month that included a dismal English performance, chewy Luis Suarez taking a chunk out of an Italian and Brazilian dreams crumbling like soggy biscuits, finally ended on Sunday with the Germans lifting the World Cup. And in the process, living up to every well-organised and efficient stereotype in the book.
The editorial unit at Paddy Power made for a solid team going into the world’s biggest tournament, and the signature signings of flair players such as former Manchester United legend Paul Scholes, Financial Times writer Simon Kuper and professor Stephen Hawking himself, only enhanced our prospects of World Cup glory. Alright, so we didn’t get an open top bus parade through Dublin, or get our hands on football’s most prestigious trophy, but we racked up more than 1.2m views on the blog since revealing Paul Scholes on May 22 and the social team continued to take Twitter by storm with more than 1m interactions.
All 103 hours of World Cup football were live tweeted (plus the four penalty shoot-outs) and the majority of games were also featured in our live text commentaries on the blog, which were a brilliant asset to our successful World Cup-specific mobile app. This gave fans and punters alike no excuse for missing a single kick. 55 per cent of the Paddy Power Blog’s views during the World Cup came via mobile or tablet, as people followed the action on the commute home from work, in the pub with their mates, or from the comfort of the own couch. We will miss following every second of the World Cup – however it takes an awful amount of caffeine and sugar-rushes to get through Nigeria 0-0 Iran on a sleepy Monday night.
Throughout the World Cup we crunched the numbers and dug up the stats we thought punters needed to know, and we took that to a new level with Luis Suarez. After whipping out the abacus and roping in the design team, we concluded that you’re 38 times more likely to get bitten by Uruguay’s most famous cannibal than a shark in Australia. Unfortunately the bosses pulled the handbrake on our plans to go and continue this research down under before we could confirm flights.
One thing we couldn’t predict was Germany’s 7-1 hammering of Brazil in last week’s semi-final. It was the biggest semi-final loss in World Cup history and was easily the most shocking result in international football for years. Well, shocking to most people.
One UK punter based in the Midlands correctly predicted Germany to be 5-0 up at half-time at odds of 500/1, while four punters correctly backed the 7-1 correct score at the same odds. An unemployed chef from East London, John Moore picked up £2,500 after backing Germany to win 7-1 at odds of 500/1. It’s the kind of bet straight from our Stupid Punt section but the Arsenal fan claimed he had had a premonition and seen signs such as the clock being 17:17 and a package being delivered the day before with 71 on the slip, rather than his actual flat number.
John’s crazy bet looked like a stroke of genius at the end of the game, and as the hosts crashed out, he entered our Punting Hall of Fame. The social team had plenty of ammunition lined up after the result and defender David Luiz was in the line of fire.
The final itself was the most tweeted about sports event of all time with 35.6 million tweets during the telecast of the match alone. Once again the editorial team committed to bringing punters every last kick and the important analysis from inside the TV studio. Particularly, this classy moment from ITV where Ian Wright talks about Shakira has a sort of ‘Keys and Gray’ moment which was captured on Vine. It’s clocked up well over 400,000 views, but it doesn’t get any less awkward the more you watch.
The tournament might have come to an end but there’s no let-up in the office. We’ve already crunched the key stats you need to know ahead of this week’s Open Championship in Liverpool, and the social team will be live tweeting every slice, birdie and poor piece of dress sense from Merseyside this weekend.
We’ve barely ripped our World Cup wallchart of the wall and the Premier League is just 31 days away. Before that we descend into the chaos of movers and shakers in the transfer market. Whether it’s a player or a manager, being in the bookmaking industry can sometimes give you an edge before the next ground-breaking move. A decent amount of bets can often swing a market, as we showed 12 months ago when we broke the David Moyes to Manchester United story before anyone else.
And, before you know it, the Ryder Cup will be here and it becomes perfectly acceptable to be openly and passionately anti-American for a week. We dominated the event last time out with our cheeky ‘Sky Tweets’ as Europe mounted a sterling come-back to win. Here’ hoping for similar results this time around, on the greens and in the Twittersphere.
Josh Powell is an online sports journalist at Paddy Power. You can follow him on Twitter @jgpowell13