Describing itself as a language exchange app that connects people around the world to teach each other their language through video chat, Tandem’s Fanzone allows users to select a team to support and connect with others to discuss the latest results.

“A big part of what we try and do really well is to get people talking with each other and to facilitate conversations between people who don’t know each other yet,” Tandem chief executive Arnd Aschentrup said.

“Iceland is just the nicest underdog story… and so many people are rooting for them”

“We found that the World Cup seems to be a really promising common interest that so many people share and immediately gets everyone talking.”

Speaking with The PIE News, Aschentrup said the new feature had seen significant uptake among users since launching at the start of the World Cup, with around a third of users already selecting a team.

He added many demographics with previously low engagement had seen significant increases.

“Lots of Europeans and especially European males are interested in this, and they’re maybe not the most chatty group in a typical language exchange,” he said.

“Now they have clearly found something that they are all so passionate about, and they want to talk about.”

Aschentrup added that each day so far had seen the app reach new records of engagement, and the top ten most popular countries to support were Brasil, Germany, France, Mexico, Russia, Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Portugal and Japan.

Fan favourite, Iceland, had also managed to capture the imagination of users, he added.

“It’s a quite special time of the year where so many billions of people are following this, and of course you have so many stories in the World Cup.

“Iceland is just the nicest underdog story… and so many people are rooting for them.”

After the successes so far, Aschentrup said there were plans to roll out the feature for other World Cups and possibly the Olympics.

Tandem featured in a recent analysis on how language learning apps attract users and drive engagements.