A football world cup in Brazil, described as the best yet, may be trumped in media coverage if judgement in the Oscar Pistorius murder trial is given before the final game.

This is according to South African media monitoring expert Tonya Khoury, who has released statistics for the Pistorius murder trial from over 100 countries in 75 different languages over a 100 day period.

Her media data is gathered from across the globe in over 60,000 online newspapers and as discussed on social networks.

South African paralympic athlete Pistorius returned to court on Monday following his six-week long psychiatric evaluation. Pistorius is facing murder charges for killing his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

He returns to court; though, during the FIFA football world cup. The world cup has notched up strong global media interest spurred on by a biting incident from Uruguay’s Luis Suárez, goals galore and nail-biting matches between the likes of Brazil and Chile on Saturday.

Leading up to Pistorius returning to court, Suarez has been mentioned by 88.07% of media outlets studied by Khoury. The Pistorius trial in comparison; though, has only received 2.95% of mentions during that time, while both Oscar and Suarez (together as fallen heroes) have been mentioned 8.98% of the time.

“If Oscar is given judgement during the World Cup, I dare say he might trump the news media in most of the world,” Khoury has told ITWeb Africa.

“If the proceedings of the trial drag out as we have seen before, I think the World Cup will win the media race,” she added.

Other statistics that Khoury has provided include that the US has the most media coverage of the Pistorius trial over a 100 day period. 32.43% of the global media mentions of the Pistorius trial have come from the US.

Australia is second in the world with Pistorius media coverage at 15.66% while the UK and Germany are third and fourth respectively with 12.02% and 11.15%.

South Africa comes in at 10.4% over a 100 day period.