Sunday’s Euro 2012 final saw a dominant Spanish squad crush the Italians by a score of 4-0 – a performance that makes Spain the first country to win back-to-back European Championships, and throws their name in the running as one of the greatest teams ever.
And while Spain was busy scoring goals late, putting and exclamation point on their win, people were tweeting their thumbs off. Yesterday’s match saw fans break the all-time Twitter record for tweets per second (sports related). According to the Twitter blog, global traffic peaked at 15,358 tweets per second as Spain scored their fourth goal.
That shatters the previous sports-related Twitter activity record of 12,233 recorded at this year’s Super Bowl. Before that, then-Denver Bronco QB Tim Tebow helped set the record at 9,420 when his team vanquished the Steelers with some overtime playoff heroics.
Overall, 16.5 million tweets rolled in throughout the course of the match.
Twitter also gives us a cool visualization of mentions of the top 16 teams throughout the tournament.
This data visualization shows how often people mentioned Europe’s top 16 national teams from the group stages through the final between Spain and Italy. You can see how often all of the teams were mentioned throughout the tournament and look at how mentions compare for competitors for each match. These different perspectives should give you a strong sense of how people reacted during the matches on Twitter. Look, for example, at the big spikes in Tweets that tend to occur during goals.
Did you watch the game? If not, you can check out some of the highlights and gooooaaaalllllls below:
