Champions League Soccer Breaks Super Bowl’s Record For Twitter Activity

The Super Bowl may be the biggest sporting event in the U.S., but around the world American football doesn’t hold a candle to soccer’s … err, football’s … popularity.

That was proved true on Twitter yesterday when the Champions League semifinal between Barcelona and Chelsea set a new tweets-per-second (TPS) record for a sporting event.

Twitter announced that 13,684 TPS were hitting its platform during the match, breaking the Super Bowl’s record of 12,233 TPS set in February.

As Twitter becomes more mainstream — you can hardly watch a TV show of any kind in the U.S. today without seeing Twitter hashtags on the screen — I’d expect future sporting events to surpass yesterday’s Champions League record.

By the way, the overall record-holder for TPS is still a Japanese broadcast of Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, which produced 25,088 tweets per second back on December 9, 2011.