Facebook reveals football stats ahead of World Cup

Facebook has upped its game ahead of this year’s World Cup by sharing data in an attempt to get more marketers back to the network.

With social media usage growing year on year, the upcoming tournament in Brazil is well on track to becoming the most social competition ever. With 32 teams competing from all over the world, and a lot of the participants and their clubs active online, Facebook appears to be panicking that marketers will be spending their money elsewhere this summer.

The social giant has revealed that 500 million users of its network are football fans – with 13.2 million of these based in the UK – which is quite the stat. The only downside to this is that the company is classing fans as anyone who has liked a team or player’s page. Serial likers will probably appoint for a large percentage of these, so it’s best to take this with a pinch of salt.

In a blog post titled The Biggest Stadium In The World, Facebook published the following infographic which outlines the demographic breakdown of football fans in the UK along with a breakdown of how active they are online.

Facebook’s infographic about football fans in the UK.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has attempted to encroach on Twitter’s established real-time user base: the introduction of hashtags and list of trending topics were also seen as a shift towards live engagement. It’ll be interesting to see how many marketers choose to invest more in Facebook during the World Cup than elsewhere.