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A recent study posted as a preprint on the academic platform SSRN.com suggests that a person’s political ideology predicts their preference in the global sports rivalry between soccer stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The research provides evidence that political identity shapes cultural tastes far outside the realm of government, with liberal leaning individuals favoring Messi and conservative leaning individuals favoring Ronaldo. This link between politics and sports preferences tends to be strongest among younger generations who grew up in highly politically divided environments.
In recent years, political scientists have explored a concept known as identity sorting. This describes the way a single political label now groups together many different parts of a person’s identity, including religious beliefs, cultural values, and consumer habits. Instead of just organizing how people vote, political identity seems to organize broad lifestyle choices.
Most existing evidence for this expanding reach of political identity comes from the United States, where the political system is heavily divided between two parties. The authors wanted to test if this phenomenon happens on a global scale across many different types of governments and cultures. To do this, they needed a globally recognized cultural subject that remains exactly the same while the audience changes.
Saifuddin Ahmed, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University and director of the Social Media and Political Engagement Lab, helped lead the research. “Political-identity sorting is well documented in obviously political domains, mostly in American samples,” Ahmed said. “What we wanted to know was whether it leaks into domains that feel completely apolitical, and whether it does so across very different societies rather than just in the US.”
The debate over who is the better soccer player provided an excellent test case. Both athletes have remarkably similar career achievements, meaning a fan’s choice between them often reveals more about the fan’s own values. “Messi versus Ronaldo is close to an ideal test case as it’s globally legible, it’s a clean binary almost everyone has an opinion on, and on its face, it has nothing to do with politics,” Ahmed explained.
The two players project very different public personas through the media. Messi is widely viewed as quiet, focused on his family, and dedicated to his team. Ronaldo is generally seen as individually dominant, highly self promotional, and vocal about his personal excellence. These differing public images map onto a psychological divide between communitarian values and dominance values, which often separates liberal and conservative political ideologies.
“The two also represent genuinely contrasting archetypes, one built around quiet, natural craft, the other around individual dominance and self-assertion,” Ahmed told PsyPost. “If political identity were shaping even this, that would tell us something about how deep the sorting goes. The World Cup gave us a natural moment to ask.”
For their study, the researchers surveyed 10,661 respondents across 26 countries spanning six continents. The online surveys were conducted between April and May of 2026. Participants were asked to rate their favorability of both Messi and Ronaldo on a seven-point scale.
Ahmed clarified that the survey asked about the overall public image of the athletes, not their raw athletic abilities. “We measured favorability, image, persona, the whole package, not footballing skill,” he said. “Those are different questions, and one can expect the skill question to maybe look different.”
The researchers calculated a difference score for each participant to determine their relative preference between the two players. The scientists also measured several individual traits. They asked participants to rate their political ideology on a scale from extremely conservative to extremely liberal, and they assessed a trait called authoritarianism, which captures a preference for strong leaders who bypass democratic institutions.
The authors found that within-country political ideology was the most reliable individual predictor of player preference. Respondents who were more liberal than their national average tended to prefer Messi. Respondents who were more conservative than their national average were significantly more likely to prefer Ronaldo.
The findings indicate that “our cultural tastes are a little less apolitical than we feel,” Ahmed said. “Across 26 very different countries, the strongest individual-level predictor of who someone picks aren’t their education, age, or income, it’s where they sit politically.”
“We didn’t measure intent, so I genuinely can’t speak to what’s deliberate. What the data supports is narrower: that the two GOATs present very different public personas, and audiences clearly read those personas as carrying different values, consistently enough that it tracks with political identity. Whether that contrast is strategic brand-building or simply who these two footballers are, our study can’t distinguish. What I’d say is that the personas are available to be read this way, and people evidently do read them this way.”
The scientists note that this pattern emerged across democracies, multi-party systems, and authoritarian states. However, Ahmed emphasized that many other factors still play a role in sports fandom. “Most of why we prefer one player is still personal, who we grew up watching, how much football we know, club loyalty,” he explained.
“Politics is a consistent signal sitting underneath all of that,” Ahmed continued. “The takeaway isn’t ‘your politics decides your favorite footballer’ but it’s that political identity quietly colors even the choices we’d swear have nothing to do with it.”
Personality and media habits also played independent roles in shaping preferences. Frequent consumption of short form video news was a strong predictor of a Ronaldo preference. When analyzing age, the researchers found that the political divide between Messi and Ronaldo fans was strongest among younger adults and faded in older age groups.
Ahmed suggests that modern media algorithms might be accelerating this process. “First, heavier users of short-form video news lean measurably toward Ronaldo, and the political effect is sharpest in younger respondents and fades with age,” he said. “Both fit a world where algorithmic feeds bundle cultural and political identity together more tightly for people who came up inside them.”
When looking at national trends, the researchers found significant preference differences in 19 of the 26 nations. South Korea showed the strongest preference for Messi, while countries like Indonesia showed strong preferences for Ronaldo. Ahmed explained that some of these national extremes have specific, non-political contexts.
“South Korea is the single most Messi-leaning country, but not because Koreans are unusually enthusiastic about Messi,” Ahmed said. “It’s that they rate Ronaldo unusually low, the lowest in our whole dataset. It’s likely to do with Ronaldo’s no-show during the 2019 friendly and its after-effects.”
For the nations that favored Ronaldo, Ahmed pointed to different cultural factors. “And for the countries that lean a bit more toward Ronaldo, the explanation we’d point to is structural, younger populations, very high short-form-video use, a decade of brand presence, not religious attribution,” he noted.
Readers should view the findings as preliminary evidence, as the study was published as a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review. The cross-sectional design also means the data was collected at a single point in time, making it impossible to prove cause and effect. Ahmed wants readers to understand the practical limits of the findings.
“It predicts, it doesn’t determine,” Ahmed emphasized. “The finding is that within a given country, people who lean more conservative than their compatriots tend to rate Ronaldo a little higher and not that all conservatives are Ronaldo fans and all liberals are Messi fans.”
He also highlighted that the mathematical size of the political link is relatively modest. “The political effect is small in absolute terms, the individual-level predictors together explain about 3% of the variance in preference,” Ahmed said. “So, if someone walks away thinking politics completely ‘explains’ the GOAT debate, that’s a misread.”
Despite its modest size, the trend remains statistically meaningful because it appears so consistently. “What makes the effect interesting isn’t 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. “A small effect based on patterns across many cultures is a signal.”
Future research will likely focus on tracking these younger fans over time to see if their political and cultural identities remain intertwined. “The honest truth is a single snapshot can’t tell you whether today’s young, more-sorted fans stay that way or converge toward everyone else as they get older,” Ahmed said. “That’s a cohort-versus-life-cycle question only repeated measurement can answer, so tracking these cohorts is high on the list.”
The scientists also plan to examine other topics to see how far this identity sorting reaches. “The obvious one is testing whether the same sorting shows up in other apolitical cultural domains, to see how general it is,” Ahmed noted. “The second is methodological housekeeping, there are clean variables we didn’t capture this round, club allegiance is the big one, that would sharpen the picture.”
“Other globally legible rivalries, in or out of sport, are attractive mainly as replication tests,” Ahmed added. “If the same political signal turns up in a completely different binary, that’s much stronger evidence that we’re seeing identity sorting rather than something specific to football.”
The public reaction to the preprint has already shown that the core concept strikes a chord with many people. “The public response has been part of the story too; the data resonated widely online on social media, which I read as a sign people sense something real in it, even if the effect is modest,” Ahmed said.
At its core, the paper uses sports as a tool to uncover deeper truths about human psychology. “This isn’t only a football study,” Ahmed concluded. “It’s a study of identity and values that happens to use the most globally legible question we could find. Also, the contribution isn’t any single country result, it’s that a political signal shows up across 26 societies that otherwise have very little in common.”
The study, “Political Identity Beyond Politics: The Messi-Ronaldo Preference Across 26 Countries,” was authored by Saifuddin Ahmed, Kokil Jaidka, Muhammad Ehab Rasul, and Teresa Gil-LĂłpez.
