SALT LAKE CITY — Utah is hosting two unprecedented sports events this week: Lionel Messi's Inter Miami playing Real Salt Lake on Wednesday night, and an NHL playoff game featuring the Utah Mammoth at the Delta Center on Friday.
I decided to turn to Google Trends to see how many people are searching for Lionel Messi compared with searches for the Utah Mammoth.
Nationwide, Utah's interest in Messi today is far higher than in any state and by quite a margin. Google ranks trends by the intensity of search volume for each state's population on a scale of one to 100. In searches for Lionel Messi, Utah is 100, and the next most intense interest is Wyoming, which ranked with a 15.
However, that does not transcend our other big sports story. When comparing searches for Messi against searches for the Utah Mammoth, Utahns searched far more for the state's hockey team than for the world's biggest soccer star.
Every Utah city showed more search interest in the Mammoth than in Messi. Out of four of Utah's bigger cities, interest in Lionel Messi is closest to equaling the Mammoth in West Valley City. Still, the Mammoth have been searched two times for every one search for Lionel Messi.
So the Mammoth get more attention, but don't hold it against Messi. When one player from out of town playing one early-season game on a Wednesday gets enough attention to compare to a local pro team's first playoff run, that player is clearly a very big deal.
