Yesterday’s 7-1 World Cup Semi-Final rout of Brazil by Germany will go down in the record books for many decades to come for a multitude of reasons. Sure, Brazil is the host nation and they’ve been picked by many, including Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog to win it all. But yesterday, the German national team proved all of them wrong with an impressive 7-0 display up until the 90th minute when Oscar scored the face-saving only goal for Brazil. Now that we know that World Cup Semi-Finals can have as many points scored as an American Football game, it comes as no surprise that such a game stirred up quite a ruckus on Twitter.
According to the BBC a record 35.6 million tweets were sent during the course of the 90 minutes of the game’s play. It also broke the record for the most tweets per minute with 580,601 tweets in a single minute. This happened when Germany scored their fifth goal on Brazil, obviously setting off a firestorm on Twitter. Any game that reaches a 5-0 result is pretty much considered a rout or much much worse. The previous tweets-per-minute record for a sporting event was set by another World Cup match, when Brazil played against Chile, which had 389,000 tweets per minute. Previous to that, the 2014 Superbowl held the record at 382,000 tweets per minute, which isn’t that much of a surprise but only stands to show the evermore increasing importance of Twitter.
In addition to setting off a firestorm of tweets that probably sent Twitter’s network engineers in a scramble to ensure there was enough bandwidth the game also took up 6 of the 10 top trending spots on Twitter. The #BrazilvsGermany hastag took the top spot while players like Miroslav Klose took the top spot for being the most tweeted during the game.
