Top 7 Sites to Follow the FIFA World Cup Online

Best Ways to Follow the FIFA World Cup 2010 Online

The ongoing Fifa World Cup 2010 is football's (or soccer's) showpiece event held every four years. More than any football World Cup of the past, the current event at South Africa has garnered extensive online coverage -- on sports news websites and Twitter, especially. If you are unable to watch every single match played at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, worry not. With the sites and services mentioned below, rest assured you will not miss anything before, during, and after the live game.

FIFA.com: World Football's governing body responsible for bringing out the four-yearly soccer extravaganza doesn't shy away from covering the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Head over to FIFA.com for the latest match previews, build-ups, and pundit analysis. And if you've missed the live match, FIFA.com has all the match highlights and reactions at your disposal. Click on the site's News section to get exclusive reports from matches including player interviews. FIFA.com's Have Your Say welcomes fans to discuss and debate about the fortunes of their favorite players and teams in the tournament. There's a lot of action here for you to keep track of, if you want to follow the World Cup in South Africa online. FIFA.com has also teamed up with Google to facilitate the 2010 World Cup's fan following across the globe. Google search for "world cup", "world cup england", or "world cup group a" to get quick links to game recaps, live updates, standings and team profiles on FIFA.com. There's also a FIFA Chrome extension to better follow the FIFA World Cup 2010 online through Google Chrome. Follow FIFA.com on Twitter.

BBC Sport - FIFA World Cup 2010: The British Broadcasting Corporation or BBC has left no stone unturned in its coverage of world football's greatest sporting event. With an accomplished team of sports writers and journalists, BBC provides all the latest scoop from their South African base covering the 2010 FIFA World Cup. BBC has a live match blog with a staff writer providing minute-by-minute updates from the football match (somewhat like Cricinfo's Live Scorecard but better), with followers joining the conversation from around the world -- a mix of people calling in, comments made on BBC 5 Live's 606 community, and Twitter tweets -- all discussing the match in progress. BBC Sport's opinion pages (writer blogs) are some of the best in the business to provide insightful team and player news and events from South Africa.
Like FIFA.com, BBC Sport's World Cup Home page allows you a quick glance at major stories from last night's matches, exclusive match previews, group tables and team standings. You can also go to individual team and player pages and find an image gallery of the day's highlights. There's also a video section with latest player and coach interviews, and even though BBC shines a bright spotlight on England's fortunes at the World Cup, it does a very good job of fairly covering other teams and action from South Africa.

GOAL.com World Cup 2010 Home: One of the best online source for all things football or soccer, Goal.com is right up there among the top websites covering the 2010 World Cup in South Africa online. Goal.com offers its website in 22 different editions in over 10 different languages for visitors coming from all over the world.

The site presents its featured articles nicely with auto-scroll and right up front. There's no dearth of reading material on Goal.com, with news and updates from all your favorite teams and players constantly pumped in. Like FIFA.com, Goal.com also has perhaps the most unbiased coverage of the Soccer World Cup in South Africa -- covering every team equally. Goal.com has extensive match previews, predictions, and videos before every game's kickoff and (like BBC) has a dedicated auto-refresh live match commentary page that gives you all the important action from the pitch. Follow GOAL.com on Facebook and Twitter. You can also download a free iPhone, iPod Touch app for Goal.com from iTunes.

ESPN Soccernet: The worldwide leader in sports broadcasting does a very good job covering the FIFA World Cup online from South Africa. ESPN's staff writers regularly come up with insightful articles, but what I like best about ESPN is its video section -- especially the South Africa Daily videos, a half-hour video recap and analysis of the day's games with pundits and highlights. I also like their individual team-level pages which features the top stories and latest news of your favorite team and players, with video interviews and more. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can download ESPN's free World Cup app from the iTunes Store.
If you're an EPL (English Premier League) fan and are used to seeing John Dykes, Gerry Armstrong and Co. on TV every weekend, head over to ESPNStar.com's World Cup coverage -- not as extensive as ESPN Soccernet's -- for opinions from your trusted football pundits on what's hot at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

Footytube: If your focus is just on videos from the Football World Cup in South Africa, you just have to visit Footytube. It may not be the best looking site of the bunch, but Footytube has very good video coverage of the FIFA World Cup. It has a blog-like navigation style, with latest updates surfacing at the top. Footytube's kind of a content aggregator, pulling in articles from various sources. Most of its text-based news and analysis seems to be powered from The Guardian, whereas videos seem to be pulled from all over the place, including YouTube and other sources. Check out its World Cup News Videos and Latest World Cup Videos section for match highlights, analysis and player interviews. I like Footytube's frequency of updates and its World Cup coverage is pretty good -- a great destination for watching the latest World Cup videos from South Africa, as I said.

Twitter World Cup Home: How can a sporting event of such magnitude as the FIFA World Cup not be covered extensively on Twitter? Forget about a mish-mash of tweets floating around with no means to keep track of -- the World Cup in South Africa has its own home on Twitter. The page has a nice clean interface with live tweets from FIFA's twitter page shown on the left and upcoming matches previewed in a list on the right. Click on any one match to see a stream of live tweets on the two featured teams. Alternatively, if you just want to follow the fortunes of your favorite team, click on the 32 flags at the top of the page to select the respective team's twitter stream. You will never miss a World Cup beat if you're on Twitter, and its World Cup home is great starting point for you to keep track of the soccer extravaganza and join the conversation. Twitter also filters and ranks top World Cup tweets on a separate account -- follow Top World Cup Tweets.

TweetBeat: Another interesting website to keep track of the World Cup is TweetBeat (powered by Kosmix). It filters hundreds of instant World Cup conversations on Twitter in real-time, bringing you the best ones to whet your World Cup appetite. You can't really participate in the various World Cup conversations on TweetBeat -- the site's like a starting point for you to know what people are tweeting about the World Cup and start following them. You can manually adjust the time intervals between consecutive updates (Fast or Slow) with a slider bar at the top. Click on any game to get two side-by-side lists of tweets related to the teams. TweetBeat also pulls top tweets from Twitter in the right column of its page, and everything is very easy to click and follow. TweetBeat sports a clean interface and not only is it a nice and unique way to keep on top of the latest World Cup news, but it's also a good way to make new friends. There's also a free iPhone/iPod Touch app for TweetBeat.

Home page image courtesy: Jinan KV