Alex Ferguson's Retirement: Nearly 1.5M Tweets in 1 Hour
Saying goodbye to an institution.
To say Sir Alex Ferguson is something of a fixture at Manchester United Football Club would be a bit of an understatement. He's managed the football club since 1986. So, it stands to reason that when he announced his plans to retire, there was a pretty widespread reaction. In fact, Crave reports that Twitter has seen nearly one and a half million tweets in the space of an hour.
The news was actually first announced on Twitter, with the official club feed releasing the following tweet at 09:17 (local time) this morning:
"Sir Alex Ferguson retires. #thankyousiralex"
So far, that tweet has been retweeted almost 32,000 times and favorited by nearly 3,200 Twitter users. According to CNet, the knock-on effect from this tweet was 1.4 million mentions of the story in just an hour. The official MUFC feed has been tweeting reactions from various different personalities (including David Beckham and Prime Minister David Cameron) all day, finished each tweet with the hashtag #thankyousiralex.
If you want to keep up with the Alex Ferguson retirement news, you can check out the liveblog that the Guardian newspaper has going on.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
-
blubbey Manager of Manchester United (Man U), a team in the Premier League, has been for 27 years, won 38 trophies in that time. They have quite a few supporters - http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/may/29/manchester-united-premierleague - and if it's increased at the same rate more than 10% of the world are supporters, more than double the US's population. So yeah. A pretty popular person probably.Reply -
greghome ReplyExactly my thoughts, who is he and why should we care?
You do know that America is the only place where American football is called football right?
and also the only place where the game is played.........
Football Football or in your case soccer.....is an international sport enjoyed by almost every nation, including Americans, but mostly the rest of the world :P -
fkr I always thought that in countries where people were good at soccer it was called futball.Reply
but in the end soccer is just 1800's slang for association, as in football association.
soccer (n.)
1889, socca, later socker (1891), soccer (1895), originally university slang (with jocular formation -er (3)), from a shortened form of Assoc., abbreviation of association in Football Association (as opposed to Rugby football); cf. rugger, but they hardly could have taken the first three letters of Assoc. -
back_by_demand Worlds most valuable sports team brand at $2.2 billion, put that in context, the NY Yankees are worth $1.8 billion, as are the Dallas CowboysReply -
back_by_demand Worlds most valuable sports team brand at $2.2 billion, put that in context, the NY Yankees are worth $1.8 billion, as are the Dallas CowboysReply -
COLGeek Average US Sports Fan: "Who?"Reply
Average Sports Fan from Anywhere Else on the Planet: "Say it isn't so!"