UEFA Champions League final got 28m people talking on Facebook

As FC Barcelona romped to a 3-1 victory over Juventus in Saturday’s UEFA Champions League final, millions of people around the world appear to have had one eye on the action and the other on their smartphone. In fact, data released by the social network suggests that some 28-million people drove 76-million interactions on Facebook around the final this year.

According to Facebook, Neymar was the most-buzzed about player while FC Barcelona was the team with the highest level of conversation about the match. Interestingly, most of the conversation appears to have come out of Brazil, followed by Italy, Indonesia, Mexico, and the United States. Despite being home to the winning team, Spain languished as far back as sixth in the levels of conversation on Facebook.

Perhaps supporting the losing team meant that Italians felt more compelled to vent their frustrations on the social network. In Italy, 2.4-million people drove 6.8-million interactions about the game, more than double the number of interactions which came from Spain.

While Neymar’s extra time goal (also the most talked about moment in the match) probably guaranteed that he would be the most spoken about player in the match, but the genius of Lionel Messi also shone through. Despite not scoring, the little maestro was the second most talked about player globally and the most talked about in both Spain and Italy.

Unsurprisingly, men aged between 18 and 35 dominated conversation, although it’s heartening to see that more women aged 18 to 24 were talking about the match than teenage boys.

Facebook has also produced a visualisation showing how the conversation around the match flowed.

Image: FC Barcelona via Twitter.