A recent study published as a preprint on the academic platform SSRN.com suggests that a person’s political ideology predicts their preferences in the global sports competition between soccer stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. This study provides evidence that political identity shapes cultural preferences far beyond the realm of government, with liberal-leaning individuals preferring Messi and conservative-leaning individuals preferring Ronaldo. This link between politics and sports preferences tends to be strongest among younger generations who grew up in highly politically polarized environments.
In recent years, political scientists have studied a concept known as identity categorization. This explains how a single political label groups together different parts of a person’s identity, such as religious beliefs, cultural values, and consumption habits. Political identity appears to organize not only how people vote, but also a wide range of lifestyle choices.
Most of the existing evidence for a growing range of political identities comes from the United States, where the political system is highly divided between two political parties. The authors wanted to test whether this phenomenon occurs on a global scale across different types of governments and cultures. To do this, they needed a cultural theme that remained exactly the same even as the audience changed and was universally recognized.
Saifuddin Ahmed, assistant professor and director of the Social Media and Political Engagement Institute at Nanyang Technological University, helped lead the research. “Political identity sorting is clearly well documented in the political domain, primarily in American samples,” Ahmed said. “What we wanted to know was whether it was leaking into areas that felt completely apolitical, and whether it was leaking not only within the United States but across a very different society.”
The debate over who is the better soccer player has become a great test case. The career achievements of both players are strikingly similar, and which one a fan chooses often reveals more about his or her own values. “Messi vs. Ronaldo is almost an ideal test case. It’s easy to read around the world, it’s a clear binary opposition on which almost everyone has an opinion, and it ostensibly has nothing to do with politics,” Ahmed explained.
The two players project very different public personas through the media. Messi is widely seen as quiet, focused on his family and devoted to his team. Ronaldo is generally seen as a dominant individual, highly self-promoting, and a vocal advocate of personal excellence. These different public images often map onto the psychological gulf between communitarian and dominant values that divides liberal and conservative political ideologies.
“The two also represent truly contrasting archetypes, one built around quiet, natural skill and the other built around personal superiority and assertiveness,” Ahmed told PsyPost. “If political identity shapes even this, then that might tell us something about how deep the selection goes. The World Cup gave us a natural moment to ask ourselves this question.”
For the study, researchers surveyed 10,661 respondents in 26 countries across six continents. The online survey was conducted from April to May 2026. Participants were asked to rate their liking for both Messi and Ronaldo on a seven-point scale.
Ahmed said the survey asked about an athlete’s overall public image, not their raw athletic ability. “We didn’t measure soccer skills, we measured likability, image, persona, that whole package,” he said. “These are different questions, and we would expect that the skills questions would probably be different.”
The researchers calculated a difference score for each participant to determine their relative preferences between the two players. The scientists also measured several individual characteristics. They asked participants to rate their political ideology on a scale from extremely conservative to extremely liberal, rating a trait called authoritarianism, which refers to a tendency to favor strong leaders who avoid democratic institutions.
The authors find that domestic political ideology is the most reliable individual factor predicting player preferences. More liberal respondents were more likely to prefer Messi than the national average. Respondents who were more conservative than the national average were significantly more likely to prefer Ronaldo.
The findings show that “our cultural preferences are not as political as we feel,” Ahmed said. “Across 26 disparate countries, the strongest individual predictor of who someone will choose is not their education, age, or income, but their political position.”
“We haven’t measured intent, so we can’t really speak to what is intentional. What the data supports is narrower. The two GOATs exhibit very different public personas, and audiences read those personas as having distinctly different values, and they consistently have political affiliations.” We’re tracking identities. Whether that contrast is strategic brand building or just who these two football players are, our research can’t tell. What I’m saying is that personas can be read this way, and people are clearly reading them this way. ”
Scientists say this pattern appears across democracies, multiparty systems, and authoritarian states. However, Ahmed emphasized that there are still many other factors involved in sports fandom. “Most of the reasons why we like a player are still personal: who they grew up watching, how much they know football, their loyalty to the club,” he explained.
“Politics is the consistent signal underlying all of this,” Ahmed continued. “The point is not that ‘your politics determine your favorite footballer’, but that political identity quietly colors even choices we swear are irrelevant.”
Personality and media habits also played an independent role in shaping preferences. Frequent viewing of short-form video news was a strong predictor of Ronaldo’s preference. When the researchers analyzed age, they found that the political divide between Messi and Ronaldo fans was strongest among young people, and diminished among older age groups.
Ahmed suggests that modern media algorithms may be accelerating this process. “Firstly, heavy users of short-form video news lean considerably towards Ronaldo, and the political influence is most pronounced among younger respondents and fades with age,” he said. “Both fit into a world where algorithmic feeds more closely knit cultural and political identities and bundle the people who appear within them.”
When researchers looked at trends across countries, they found significant differences in preferences in 19 out of 26 countries. South Korea showed the strongest preference for Messi, while countries like Indonesia showed the strongest preference for Ronaldo. Mr. Ahmed explained that some of these national extremes have a certain non-political background.
“South Korea is the only country that is pro-Messi, but that’s not because Koreans are crazy about Messi,” Ahmed said. “It means they rate Ronaldo unusually low, the lowest in our entire data set. This is likely related to Ronaldo’s absence during the 2019 friendly and its after-effects.”
Regarding countries supporting Ronaldo, Ahmed cited different cultural factors. “And for the countries that lean a little more towards Ronaldo, the explanations we point to are not religious affiliation, but structural, young population, very high use of short-form videos, brand presence over the decade,” he pointed out.
This study was published as a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed, so readers should view the results as preliminary evidence. Also, the cross-sectional design means that the data were collected at a single point in time, making it impossible to prove cause and effect. Mr. Ahmed wants his readers to understand the practical limitations of his research findings.
“It’s a prediction, not a determination,” Ahmed stressed. “The result is that people who tend to be more conservative than their compatriots in a given country tend to rate Ronaldo a little higher, and not all conservatives are fans of Ronaldo and not all liberals are fans of Messi.”
He also emphasized that the mathematical scale of political connections is relatively modest. “Political influence is small in absolute terms. Together, individual-level predictors explain about 3% of the variance in preferences,” Ahmed said. “So if anyone walks away thinking that politics completely ‘explains’ the GOAT debate, that’s a misread.”
Despite its modest magnitude, this trend remains statistically significant because it appears consistently. “What makes this effect interesting is not its size; it’s two other things: it’s the strongest of the individual predictors we tested, and it’s based on data from 26 countries,” Ahmed explained. “Small effects based on patterns across many cultures are signals.”
Future research will likely focus on following these young fans over time to see if their political and cultural identities remain intertwined. “The honest truth is that you can’t tell from a single photo whether today’s younger, more discerning fans will stay the same or focus on other fans as they get older,” Ahmed said. “This is a cohort and lifecycle question that can only be answered by repeating measurements, so tracking these cohorts is high on the list.”
Scientists also plan to investigate other topics to see how far this identity classification extends. “The obvious thing to do is to test whether the same classification also appears in other non-political cultural areas and see how common it is,” Ahmed said. “The second thing is methodological housekeeping. There are clear variables that we didn’t capture in this round. Club loyalty is a big factor and that will give us a clearer picture.”
“Other globally recognizable rivalries, both inside and outside of sports, are attractive primarily as replication tests,” Ahmed added. “If the same political signals appear in completely different binaries, that’s stronger evidence that identity consolidation is occurring, rather than something specific to football.”
Public response to the preprint has already shown that the core concept resonates with many people. “Public reaction was also part of the story. The data resonated widely online on social media, and I read that as a sign that people felt there was something real in the data, even if the effect was modest,” Ahmed said.
At the heart of this paper is the use of sport as a tool to uncover deeper truths about human psychology. “This is more than just soccer research,” Ahmed concluded. “This is a study of identity and values that happens to use the most globally readable questions we have found. And its contribution is not the result of any particular country, but that political signals are emerging across 26 societies with little in common.”
The study, “Political Identity Beyond Politics: Messi-Ronaldo Preferences Across 26 Countries,” was authored by Saifuddin Ahmed, Kokil Jayka, Muhammad Ehab Rasul, and Teresa Gil López.
