After the World Cup, Americans made a lot of friends with Brazilians

The World Cup just ended last Sunday, as we may expect, passionate soccer fans who are lucky enough to visit Brazil probably have made a lot of international friends. Facebook data scientists now tell us from which countries we made the most friends.

First of all, the beautiful game increases our likelihood to make a new friend from another country by 50 percent.

“Travelers to Brazil begin June with a relative high 10 percent probability of a new friend living in a different country, but it increases to about 15 percent during the tournament,” Facebook data scientist Sean Taylor wrote in a blog post.

According to a friendship chart in the post, most of the international friends Americans made during the game are actually Brazilians, who just live there. Americans also made some friends with other visitors: Britons ranked the first, followed by visitors from Australia, Mexico, Colombia, and Canada.

For Brazilians, they made the most friends with Americans, followed by visitors from Australia, Argentina, Mexico, and the UK.

However, the data Facebook looked at to identify the formation of friendship was just “request + confirmation,” according to Sean Taylor, in an email to VentureBeat.

Lucky folks who just came back from Brazil, please let us know if you are still inbox messaging your newly made friends from Brazil and the UK.

Facebook boasts 802 million daily active users, generating a huge amount of data for analysis. Their data scientists are engaged in a variety of projects, ranging from boosting voter turnout to mood manipulation experiment. The company is even going to hold an academic only conference to recruit sociologists.

In addition to these grand projects, Facebook provides us with interesting data analysis reports every now and then. For more details to this World Cup friendship report, read it here.