This year's World Cup will play out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and messaging apps like WhatsApp just as it progresses in stadiums from Sao Paulo to Rio De Janeiro.
Nearly 40 per cent of Facebook's 1.28 billion users are fans of soccer.
On Tuesday, the world's biggest online social network is adding new features to help fans follow the the world's most widely viewed sporting event taking place in Brazil from June 12 to July 13.
Facebook users will be able to keep track of their favourite teams and players in a special World Cup section, called "Trending World Cup."
Available on the web as well as mobile devices, the hub will include the latest scores, game highlights as well as a feed with tournament-related posts from friends, players and teams.
An interactive map will show where the fans of top players are around the world and there will be a page called FacebookRef, where fans can see commentary about the matches from "The Ref," Facebook's official tournament commentator.
In 2010, when the last World Cup took place in Johannesburg, South Africa, Facebook had just 500 million users. Now there are just that many soccer fans (people who have "liked" a team or a player) on the site, the company says.
Users can get to the World Cup hub by clicking on "World Cup" in the list of trending topics on the site.
Facebook, which counts 81 per cent of its users outside the US and Canada, is unveiling its World Cup features at a time when the company is working to become a place for more real-time, public conversations about big events- a la Twitter.
Such events attract big advertising dollars, though the company is not saying how much money it expects to make from World Cup-related ads.
Not to be outdone, Twitter touted in a blog post last week that the "the only real-time (hash)WorldCup global viewing party will be on Twitter, where you can track all 64 matches, experience every goal and love every second, both on and off the pitch."
Fans can follow individual teams or players and use the hashtags (hash)WorldCup to tweet about the matches, and follow official accounts such as (at)FIFAWorldCup, (at)ussoccer for the United States team and (at)CBF-Futebol for Brazil's soccer governing body, for example. Clicking on the (hash)WorldCup or (hash)WorldCup2014 hashtags, meanwhile, will take you to Twitter's hubs for the event.
Twitter is also bringing back the "hashflags" it introduced in the 2010 World Cup. Users who tweet three-letter country codes for participating nations - such as BRA for Brazil - will see the country's flag appear in their tweet. Twitter says it will then tally the mentions in its "World Cup of tweets."
For fans in Brazil for the games and hoping to tweet and post about it on Facebook, the country's mobile communications services might pose their own challenge.
Dropped voice calls are common and accessing the internet can be incredibly slow, and there's even worry about network blackouts.
"World Cup visitors won't be able to communicate the way they want to," Christopher Gaffney, a visiting professor at Rio de Janeiro's Federal Fluminense University who focuses on Brazil's preparations for the World Cup.
"Instagram, Twitter, social media will not function at world class levels but at Brazilian levels, so people visiting Brazil will experience the frustrations we face every day."
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