Ronaldo most-followed World Cup player on Twitter

Ahead of the Brazilian World Cup, which kicks off this week, new statistics reveal the incredible prominence some of the world’s top players have on social media platform Twitter.

According to Statista, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo is the most-followed FIFA World Cup player on Twitter, with 26.5 million followers, followed by Brazil’s Neymar Junior (10.7 million) and England’s Wayne Rooney (8.8 million).

Behind the top three, Spanish players dominate the top 10, while Germany’s Mesut Ozil and Argentina’s Sergio Aguero take the final two spots.

During the last 15 minutes of the final match of the 2010 World Cup, an average of 2,000 tweets were sent per second, with Spain’s winning goal scoring 3,051 tweets per second, according to Twitter.

Since then, the number of monthly active users on Twitter has increased almost tenfold from 30 million to 255 million, so a significant increase on 2010’s figures can most likely be expected.