As the World Cup Crowns a Winner, so does BBM’s Football Fever Review

Throughout the World Cup this year, we’ve been keeping you up to speed on the most active countries on BBM during the games. At the outset, we saw the United Kingdom showing their fanaticism, but they fell to second place behind South Africa as the tournament wore on.

Surprisingly, regardless of which countries were in the finals, our standings for BBM’s Football Fever review has remained the same in the final week of the tournament. Spain, Portugal and Belgium continued to be about 50% more active on BBM during game times. Meanwhile, the UK saw a surge, increasing activity to 69% higher during games than non-games, up from 60% the previous week. Still, that remained just slightly behind our BBM Football Fever winner, South Africa at 73%.

Now that the Cup has been claimed (Congratulations Germany!), football fans all over the world return to reality. But not before we take one last look at the BBM data during the hard-fought and phenomenal championship match between Germany and Argentina:

• The 2014 World Cup final showed the largest spike in BBM traffic ever during a sporting event.
• Global BBM traffic doubled compared to the same time during previous weeks.
• With Germany’s goal, BBM traffic increased 500% and was still 300% higher than normal traffic when the final whistle blew.

Zeroing in on just BBM users from Germany and Argentina, it was telling that German fans were more active on BBM during the final game than their Argentinian counterparts. That said, Lionel Messi fans sent more messages in the same moment of the winning goal than Germany, likely in disbelief of defeat.

Congratulations to all the teams who participated in this years’ thrilling tournament – 32 teams, 64 matches and only 1 goal after 113 minutes of play separating Champion from runner-up, this year’s tournament is surely one to be remembered.