The World Cup is the gift that keeps on giving (to me).
I was swiping through Instagram Stories during halftime of the Canada vs. Qatar World Cup match when I saw a post about a study about the political indicators of a person’s preference of soccer stars Lionel Messi, the Argentine forward, or Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese striker.
One of the major indicators was the consumption of short-form news video.
Click.
The preprint paper, posted at the end of May, is titled “Political identity beyond politics: The Messi-Ronaldo preference across 26 countries.” Researchers surveyed more than 10,000 adults in 26 countries and found that people who identified as more liberal tended to prefer Messi, while people who considered themselves more conservative prefer Ronaldo.
Another differentiator? People who frequently consumed short-form video news preferred Ronaldo. The consumption of traditional news media, however, wasn’t a significant predictor of either preference.
The finding about short-form video consumption is broader than just “a finding about Messi and Ronaldo,” said Saifuddin Ahmed, the paper’s lead author. (The other authors are Kokil Jaidka and Muhammad Ehab Rasul from the National University of Singapore, and Teresa Gil-López from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid). “It’s a finding about what different distribution environments do to audiences over time, independent of what any individual piece of content says.”
I wasn’t the only person to click on the post; it got millions of views on Instagram Reels and TikToks: “The platform that our data suggest is most associated with Ronaldo preference…became the primary vehicle for disseminating a finding about exactly that,” Ahmed said, continuing, “The algorithm apparently found our research about the algorithm quite shareable.”
I asked Ahmed about what these findings might mean for journalists and the news industry as a whole. Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Five years ago, we couldn’t have studied this properly. The platform ecosystem that algorithmically bundles political and cultural content together — TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts — has only matured recently. We are living through the first period in which a genuinely global audience is receiving its cultural information through feeds that don’t distinguish between political content and celebrity content, between a news clip and a highlight reel.
The question of whether that bundling shapes cultural preference, and whether it does so differently from traditional media, could only be asked meaningfully now. The study was designed partly to test that, and the short-form video finding is one of the results that I think has the most long-term significance.
The second reason is a gap in the academic literature that has bothered me for a long time. Nearly everything we know about political identity organizing non-political preferences comes from the United States. We needed a globally constant stimulus, something that holds the object of evaluation fixed while the audience varies across very different institutional, cultural, and political contexts.
Messi and Ronaldo are that stimulus. It makes it an unusually clean setting for asking whether the phenomenon documented in the United States is specifically American or more broad.
Third, there is something historically irreproducible about this moment. Messi and Ronaldo have both been active at the elite level for two decades. They are approaching the end of their careers. This World Cup may be among the last times both are present as active players on the global stage. Studying the rivalry while it is live, while both figures are still generating new moments and new cultural meaning, captures something that will not be available to replicate.
Ronaldo’s self-presentation is built for environments that reward visual performance, high frequency, and personal display. He is the most-followed individual on Instagram globally [with 670 million followers], and his content is suited to TikTok and Reels in a way that Messi’s quieter, less curated presence simply isn’t. [Messi has 511 million followers on Instagram.] That asymmetry suggested that platform media diet might independently predict preference, over and above ideology, personality, and demographics.
The decision to include traditional media alongside short-form video was deliberate. We wanted to test whether it was media consumption in general that predicted preference, or specifically the platform. If both predicted equally, the finding would be about exposure volume. If only short-form predicted while traditional media showed nothing, that would be a platform-specific finding with a very different set of implications.
That is exactly what we found. Traditional media consumption was a clean null result. The effect is not about how much media someone consumes. It is about where they consume it. That distinction matters enormously for how we think about platform influence on cultural preference.
The second thing that surprised me was the independence of the effect from political ideology. These are separate channels. A conservative who consumes little short-form video and a progressive who consumes a lot of it can both end up leaning Ronaldo, but through entirely different routes. The short-form video effect is not simply a proxy for the ideology effect: It operates on its own, and the two together tell a richer story than either alone.
The finding overall points to something important about how platform architecture shapes cultural preference in ways that operate beyond conscious awareness. People don’t choose to have their media diet and their football allegiances bundled together. The feed does that for them. The effect we observe is the residue of that bundling, visible in data collected.
The null result for traditional media is not a finding about how much media people consume. Someone who reads newspapers daily and watches television news every evening showed no different player preference from someone who consumes no traditional media at all. That rules out a simple “more media exposure leads to more player preference” explanation. The effect is not about volume. It is about the platform.
What makes short-form platforms structurally different from traditional media is that they don’t separate content categories. A newspaper separates sports from politics from culture. A television news program has segments. Even a news website organizes content into sections.
Short-form platforms don’t do any of that. The feed is undifferentiated: Political content, celebrity content, lifestyle content, sports highlights all arrive through the same interface, recommended by the same algorithm, in the same visual language, at the same pace. The bundling is not incidental to the platform. It is the platform. And that bundling creates preference environments that traditional media, however partisan or however consumed, simply does not create in the same way.
What I think this means for journalists and news organizations is uncomfortable but important. It suggests that where journalism is distributed now matters as much as what journalism says.
If a news organization publishes serious, well-reported work but distributes it primarily through short-form platforms, that content is not arriving in a neutral container. It is arriving in an environment that is simultaneously serving lifestyle content, celebrity culture, and algorithmically curated value signals. The cumulative effect of that environment on audiences appears to be measurable in ways that go beyond what any individual piece of content does.
The platform is doing work that the journalism cannot see and does not control.
If the platform is shaping preference environments in the way our individual-level data suggest, those effects may be most pronounced precisely in the places where traditional media never had the opportunity to establish a different kind of relationship with audiences first.
Journalists tend to focus on content on accuracy, on framing, on storytelling. Those things matter enormously. But this study suggests that the environment in which content arrives is also doing work, shaping evaluative tendencies and preference patterns in ways that operate beyond conscious awareness.
The second thing is what the null result for traditional media suggests. It is not a finding that traditional journalism is irrelevant or that audiences who consume it are unaffected by media. It is a finding that the specific mechanism, the algorithmic bundling of political, cultural, and celebrity content in an undifferentiated feed, is something that traditional media does not replicate.
That distinction should prompt some reflection about platform strategy. The question news organizations need to be asking is not just which platforms reach the most people. It is what kind of preference environment those platforms create around journalism’s content, and whether that environment is one where serious reporting can do what it is intended to do.
The third is about the generational dimension. The ideology-preference link in our study is strongest among younger respondents and fades in older adulthood. Those younger cohorts are also the audiences most reachable primarily through short-form platforms.
The two findings together suggest a compounding dynamic, a generation formed inside an algorithmic environment that bundles political and cultural signals together is also the generation whose cultural preferences are most organized by political identity. Whether that is cause or consequence or both is a question the study cannot fully answer. But the directionality is clear enough to warrant urgency in how news organizations think about their relationship with younger audiences and the platforms those audiences inhabit.
I want to be careful not to over-interpret this. A study going viral on TikTok doesn’t confirm its own findings. But there is something worth sitting with in the fact that the algorithm apparently found our research about the algorithm quite shareable. The medium demonstrated the thesis in real time, whether it intended to or not.
The second thing is about what didn’t predict preference, which I think is under-appreciated. Age, gender, education, income, and social class [did not] significantly predict whether someone preferred Messi or Ronaldo after accounting for political ideology and media consumption.
In a world where journalism and social science tend to explain everything through demographic categories, the study found that who you are socially and economically tells you very little about this particular cultural preference. What tells you more is what you value politically and where you consume your media. That is a finding about the limits of demographic explanations that I think has implications well beyond football, for how journalists think about audience segmentation, for how researchers design studies, and for how all of us think about the relationship between social position and cultural taste.
Finally, and this is the thing I most wish more journalists had asked about, the study is a reminder that the effects of media and political identity are not always visible in what people believe or what they know. Sometimes they show up in what people prefer, who they admire, what public figures they feel drawn to. That is a subtler and, in some ways, more pervasive kind of influence than misinformation or partisan framing, precisely because it doesn’t feel like influence. It feels like taste.
And taste, unlike belief, is very hard to correct.
Cite this article
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MLA
Tameez, Hanaa’. “What short news videos reveal about the Messi–Ronaldo debate — and news distribution today.” Nieman Journalism Lab. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 30 Jun. 2026. Web. 1 Jul. 2026.
APA
Tameez, H. (2026, Jun. 30). What short news videos reveal about the Messi–Ronaldo debate — and news distribution today. Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved July 1, 2026, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/06/what-short-news-videos-reveal-about-the-messi-ronaldo-debate-and-news-distribution-today/
Chicago
Tameez, Hanaa’. “What short news videos reveal about the Messi–Ronaldo debate — and news distribution today.” Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified June 30, 2026. Accessed July 1, 2026. https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/06/what-short-news-videos-reveal-about-the-messi-ronaldo-debate-and-news-distribution-today/.
Wikipedia
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| title = What short news videos reveal about the Messi–Ronaldo debate — and news distribution today
| last = Tameez
| first = Hanaa’
| work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]
| date = 30 June 2026
| accessdate = 1 July 2026
| ref = {{harvid|Tameez|2026}}
}}
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