FC Barcelona’s vaunted duo of Lionel Messi and Neymar Jr have scored again.
This time, however, their impact was felt not on the vast patch of lush turf some might refer to as their office, but rather in Google’s ubiquitous web query box.
Google Year-In-Search announced that Messi was the #1 and Neymar the #2 Top Trending Men’s Soccer Players for all of 2016 among searches originating in the United States, the American search giant revealed on Wednesday.
In a nutshell, Messi and Neymar were the soccer players who most “captured Americans attention this year,” as Forbes put it in an article published on its website, declaring, “A pair of global icons who play for Barcelona head the men’s soccer players trending charts.”
The results of Google’s annual Year-In-Search — this is its 16th edition — are the fruit of, literally, trillions of internet searches that reveal who and what commanded the spotlight over the past 12 months.
For Messi, his impressive 2016 search trend peaked in July, when he played for Argentina in the Copa América Centenario. The prestigious international tournament was held last summer in the United States, where Messi appeared in Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and East Rutherford, NJ.
Neymar’s Google search trend, however, hit a high note in August, when he was starring for Brazil as the host country of the Summer Olympics in Rio, where he led La Canarinha to the Gold Medal, scoring the winning goal in a dramatic 5–4 shootout victory over Germany in the final.
