There has been a water-cooler conversation going on around the United States about whether soccer has officially made it in the states. One view is that the 2014 World Cup acted as a distraction to the “real American sports” we support on a yearly basis. Another train of thought suggests that the United States has FINALLY taken to soccer.
So, what is it?
If you ask Twitter, it’s readily apparent that soccer has become a more than a brief craze that we “learn” to love once every four years.
Yahoo Sports came up with these following statistics to back up the map you see above.
Twitter reports that 9.1 million related tweets were sent during Tuesday’s United States-Belgium match with a whopping 1.8 million directly mentioning the unbelievable performance of American goalkeeper Tim Howard.
Needless to say, the United States work industry likely had an unproductive day, as this game started at 4 PM ET on Tuesday afternoon. These are numbers that are normally reserved for the National Football League and possibly the NBA Playoffs. Even the World Series and Stanley Cup Finals didn’t have a social media presence like this.
The Following numbers are from the 2013 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals (via Time.com).
For the second consecutive night, the World Series was also the most talked about show on Twitter by a very wide margin,” MLB wrote. “Nearly four times as many people tweeted about the World Series than anything else on television on Thursday (221,736 unique authors, +275% over the second place show, according to data from SocialGuide). Overall, they sent 451,665 total tweets, up 63% compared to the number of tweets sent during Game 2 in 2012.”
Then compare it to the overall tweets about the United States Round of 16 matchup with Belgium in the 2014 World Cup (via Yahoo.com).
None of his individiual saves (by Howard), however, ranked in the most mentioned moments in the game, according to @TwitterData. The conclusion of the match drew the most tweets with 216,659, followed by Julian Green’s hope-giving goal (187,413) and Romelu Lukaku’s goal for Belgium (178,608).
So there were more tweets about a player that entered the World Cup matchup late in the game than there were about Game 2 of the 2013 World Series.
While Twitter and the larger social media platform doesn’t necessarily represent genuine interest of the broader American public, it could very well act as a census when it comes to something like this.
If this is any indication, Tim Howard and American soccer is here to stay in the United States.
Photo: Fansided.com