Brazil hero Neymar topped the Twitter charts as football fans in more than 150 countries sent out 12.2 million tweets during the opening match of a World Cup set to represent a landmark in the development of social media.
The Barcelona striker's two goals in Brazil's controversial 3-1 win over Croatia ensured he was the most mentioned player on the micro-blogging site, according to Twitter's own monitoring of Thursday night's big kick-off in Sao Paulo.
This World Cup is widely expected to be the most tweeted event ever and the stats from the first of the 64 matches suggested the tournament will have no trouble exceeding the 150 million tweets sent about the 2012 London Olympics.
Neymer's match-winning performance was a personal triumph, in both footballing and online profile terms.
The spiky-haired 22-year-old added 165,000 followers to his @NeymarJr account over the course of the tournament's opening day, taking his total following to a heavyweight 11 million.
But he is still panting in the digital slipstream of Cristiano Ronaldo.
The Real Madrid star's reputation as the world player of the year combined with his sex symbol status with both gay and straight audiences have made him the undisputed king of the football twittersphere.
At last count Ronaldo was headed for 27 million followers, more than two and a half times the population of his native Portugal.
The Twitter data on the Brazil 2014 opener underlined how social media is rapidly transforming the way international sport is consumed with numerous fans clearly spending as much time commentating on smartphones and tablets as actually watching the match.