Move over, Super Bowl. The Champions League is taking over Twitter.
Club soccer's marquee tournament has surpassed America's biggest sporting event, at least in the Twitterverse.
The social-media company said Wednesday that Tuesday's Champions League semi-final second-leg match between Barcelona and Chelsea broke the tweets-per-second record for a sporting event.
Twitter said activity during the game, a 2-2 draw that saw Chelsea progress to the final after winning the first leg in London 1-0, peaked at 13,684 messages per second. That beat out the previous record for a sporting event, the 12,233 tweets per second during the climax of February's Super Bowl between the NFL's New York Giants and New England Patriots, which saw New York win 21-17 after scoring a touchdown with less a minute remaining.
The Super Bowl saw a total 13.7 million tweets. A Twitter spokesman said the company did not calculate the total number of messages sent during Tuesday's soccer match.
Soccer has a good track record on Twitter. The end of the FIFA Women's World Cup final between Japan and the US on July 11 saw 7,196 tweets per second, a Twitter record at the time. Japan won the game on penalties.
The tweets-per-second metric reflects the rapid rise of Twitter use: During 2008's Super Bowl the rate peaked at 27, while the peak for 2011's game was 4,064.
Still, sports still have some way to go before setting the all-time record. That belongs to a Dec. 9 television broadcast of the movie "Castle in the Sky" in Japan, which saw a peak of 25,088 tweets a second.
