GLOBAL: Before a ball is kicked, the 2014 football World Cup has already generated more social buzz than any comparable event and is set to be the most social sporting event ever.

Adobe Digital Index (ADI) collected conversations from blogs, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Twitter, Dailymotion, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, VK, Disqus, Foursquare, Metacafe, Wordpress and YouTube, across 230 countries and territories. Its analysis puts the World Cup ahead of the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in Sochi, with a total of 19m mentions in the past 12 months.

In fact, 90% of the world has already contributed to the World Cup conversation, with most of the social buzz coming from the APAC region (48% of related conversations) followed by EMEA (32%) and finally the Americas (20%).

When the figures are broken down for individual countries, Japan is far out in front, accounting for 37% of World Cup mentions. The UK is a distant second (11%), followed by Brazil (9%), Germany (8%) and the US (8%).

Other countries registering a figure included South Korea (4%), Indonesia (3%), France (3%), Spain (2%) and Nigeria (2%).

That picture alters again when considering specific platforms. On Twitter, for example, Germany was found to have the most active user base - the proportion of mentions to active users - at 17%. Then came Japan (11%), Nigeria (8%), France (5%) and the UK (5%).

Globally, the main sentiments being expressed were positive, led by admiration (27%), joy (22%) and anticipation (10%). There was, however, significant negative sentiment, including sadness (20%) and disgust (11%).

Brazilians themselves appeared less enthusiastic than the rest of the world, with 42% of the social buzz emanating from that country expressing sadness (36%), disgust (5%) or anger (1%), suggesting widespread concern at the high costs of hosting the tournament.

Joe Martin, an ADI analyst, said the data showed the value of social media to marketers. "Companies can see where in the world people are talking about them and what they are saying," he asserted.

Data sourced from Adobe Digital Index; additional content by Warc staff