With the men’s Euro 2020 tournament coming to an end, we decided to take a look at the most searched for players within the England camp.

Jack Grealish tops the results

Over the course of the tournament, players search interest undulated a fair amount, with various players dropping in and out of the ‘most searched for’ spot. However, it was Jack Grealish who eventually topped the charts with the most searches on the final day of the tournament against Italy.

That’s not all though, Grealish’s search interest averages 17.5% for the whole tournament, a first place average significantly higher than his counterparts. Looking at the data we can see that, while there were certainly times that other players caught the interest of the fans more, Grealish’s top spot place is based on people consistently searching for him the most across the tournament.

Across the whole of Euro 2020, Grealish only dropped out of the top 3 most searched for England players on a handful of occasions, showing he is clearly a firm favourite with the fans.

Bukayo Saka not too far behind

Looking at some players close by; Saka was the 2nd most searched for in the final game against Italy and the 5th most searched for player overall.

Considering at the start of the tournament Saka was ranked in 13th place compared to his teammates, he made some serious headway in becoming a household name in the UK.

In fact, Saka didn’t actually play until match 3 against the Czech’s, however it was this performance that really boosted his search rankings, and even saw him take the ‘most searched for’ spot at one point. From there on Saka became a regular starter, featuring heavily against Germany and Denmark, and finally joining the Italy game in the 70th  minute – contributions which all helped him reach a top 5 overall search result.

Whilst his search demand and popularity grew considerably throughout the tournament, admittedly Saka’s 2nd place search demand on the final game day is likely attributable to his missed penalty kick. That said, we can’t take anything away from the young 19 year old, who clearly captured hearts and has plenty more to give.

Consistent Kane, Foden and Sterling

Kane, Foden and Sterling finished 2nd , 3rd and 4th respectively in terms of their average search demand over the Euro 2020 tournament.

Sterling and Kane both had flourishes of high search demand which is perhaps unsurprising seeing as the duo started every single match and slotted home 7 goals between them – an impressive feat indeed.

Slightly more interesting though is Manchester City’s Phil Foden, who despite only making 2 starts and 1 appearance off the bench came in 3rd place for search rankings overall. Notwithstanding a small number of appearances, the young England player clearly impressed the English public with some great football, hitting the post against Croatia in the opening game and sporting a haircut that became the must-have look of the summer.

Unsung heroes

In spite of playing over 600+ minutes each, John Stones and Kyle Walker do not feature in the top 15 most searched for players over the tournament. This despite both players having a fantastic Euros and Walker even making UEFA’s team of the tournament.

Looking at the search results and wider tournament commentary together, we could suggest that perhaps it’s actually to their credit that they featured less prominently, since defensive players seemed to largely only make the headlines (and consequent Google searches) for the wrong reasons!

What’s next…

Who knew there was so much to be said about football and search statistics?! We loved combining our knowledge of SEO with a fun topic, and can’t wait to dig even deeper with our analysis of the 2022 Football World Cup. Any predictions? Let us know!

This data was collected on the 14/07/2021 and based on data collected from Google Trends.