The World Cup 2014 semi-final game between Brazil and Germany has been confirmed as the most talked about sports match ever on twitter.
Over the course of the entire 90 minutes the hashtag assigned to the game, #BRAvGER, was used 35.6 million times, eclipsing every other sporting event on the planet for worldwide social media interest.
As Mller, Klose and company piled pressure and misery on the Brazilians, scoring five goals in just half an hour, the twittersphere lit up with activity.
When German player Sami Khedira scored the fifth, the amount of tweets per minute (TPM) skyrocketed from 497,425 to 580,166 on average, almost 10,000 tweets per second.
The #BRA v #GER match also set a TPM record: Khedira's 29' goal (0-5) saw 580,166 TPM. #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/188YGgrgZgTwitter Data (@TwitterData) July 9, 2014
Previous events in the competition that have seen similar spikes in TPM were Chilean Gonzalo Jara's missed penalty in a crucial shootout with Brazil on 28 June. That event sparked 388,985 TPM, a full 191,181 less than the average after Germany made it five to nothing in Belo Horizonte.
Miroslav Klose, Tonis Kroos and Thomas Mller reigned supreme as the German players mentioned the most during the game.
Jlio Cesr, Oscar and Fred, meanwhile, had the ignominious honour of being the most talked about for their doomed national team.
Celebrities too, got in on the action, tweeting about the thrashing to their hundreds of thousands of followers.
Our stats man has spontaneously self-combusted!Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) July 8, 2014
This must be the worst defending performance I've seen. Shocking #WorldCup2014Ray Parlour (@RealRomfordPele) July 8, 2014
Speechless!!!! #BrazilvsGermanyTheo Walcott (@theowalcott) July 8, 2014
The data gleaned by Twitter only take into account tweets that featured assigned hashtags, meaning that millions more tweets might have been posted on top of the official figures.
The figures can also reveal key signs of how Twitter itself has grown over the past few years. Usain Bolt's 200m sprint in 2012 peaked at 80,000 TPM, while Beyonce's Super Bowl half-time show in 2013 hit 268,000 TPM.
