On Thursday, Elizabeth Lambert reminded us how physical soccer can get. The University of New Mexico defender was caught punching, smacking, and
pushing opponents, even throwing one to the ground by her ponytail in the semi-final game of the Mountain West tournament. Clips of these plays made their way online after the game, quickly igniting interest and controversy across the Web.
The Lambert Controversy: Standard Play or Over the Line?
To date, the women's soccer controversy has generated over 150 clips, including multiple copies of the original plays, analyses on sports shows, and commentary from online video viewers. While outside the traditional feel-good nature of popular online videos, these clips have managed to pull down a massive 10.2+ million views and inspire nearly 24,000 comments.
Benchmarking Lambert's performance against recent viral video phenomena Balloon Boy and JK Wedding Dance reveals how widespread the controversy has become. Balloon Boy and JK were media giants in their own right, yet Lambert tops both of them (normalized at six days). JK has gone on to top 35 million views and score an homage on NBC's The Office while Balloon Boy popped soon after the parents were charged, sitting at 10.3 million views today. It's too early to tell how much kick the Lambert story has left.
Yet the question remains about why these clips have become so popular. A number of commentators suggest Lambert's aggressive play is standard for division one soccer. But, is standard aggressive play worth 10.2+ million views? Let us know what you think.
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The data used in this post was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.
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