Facebook, Involver Launch FIFA World Cup Leaderboard

The FIFA World Cup is set to run June 11 – July 11 in South Africa and, by the time the football/soccer matches roll around, everyone everywhere will be held rapt by the games —  on Facebook. The company released its Goal! Leaderboard Thursday, created by Involver, on its Sports Facebook Page. The leaderboard allows Facebook football/soccer fans of the 32 national teams playing in the World Cup to bring some of their enthusiasm and competition to the social network in an interactive way. The leaderboard displays teams with their national flags, the number of Internet users per country, the number of likes each team has on Facebook and a variety of ways to view the results. There’s a Passion Rank, which measures a team’s Likes divided by the Internet population of the country, then there’s Popularity which measures the number of Likes and Intensity measures the week-over-week fan growth. There are also multiple ways to view the results, either by geographic region/sports association like Africa/CAF (Confederation of African Football) or by Group (sets of teams). And of course liking a team or interacting with its Facebook Page will create content for users’ news feeds. Goal! Leaderboard is currently the default tab when anyone visits Sports on Facebook’s Page. In a blog post Facebook said Involver’s application is currently available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. So far the Sports Page has more than 213,000 fans.