London based Football club Chelsea F.C. won its first Champions League title last month, defeating German side Bayern Munich to become Europe’s Champions. The match was relatively close fought and not a lot between the sides. In the end it was decided on a penalty shoot out.

Twitter dominance

The London club gained 73% of team-specific Twitter mentions related to the match, and players were buzz magnets as well. The match’s five most-mentioned players — in order, Didier Drogba, John Terry, David Luiz, Ashley Cole and Petr Cech – all Chelsea players.

Chelsea’s coach even outpaced his Bayern counterpart by a rate of more than two mentions to one.

And Chelsea’s sponsor, Samsung, was mentioned nine times as often as T-Mobile, which sponsors Bayern.

This is all according to research by the marketing firm ExactTarget, which tracked and analyzed more than 1.1 million match day tweets to see how the Champions League final played out online. ExactTarget’s findings are summarized — in both German and English — in the infographic below.

Could this information mark a change in the way English Premier League clubs are engaging social media? Sean Walsh, whose blog Digital Football is a leading source on the intersection between English soccer and social media.

“EPL clubs have been criticized in the past for their out-of-date approach to social media in comparison to the youthful and creative tactics employed by U.S. franchises in the NBA and NFL,” Walsh, who’s interviewed the digital directors of several top European clubs over the past year, told Mashable in an email. “But the 2011-2012 season has seen the rise of social media in ‘the beautiful game,’ and Premier League clubs have finally begun to invest in it.”

Walsh says EPL clubs added a total of more than 17 million Facebook fans over the course of the season. In total, the league has almost 60 million Facebook likes — all the more impressive when you consider England’s total population is just over 50 million people.

Are you a football fan? Have you interacted with your favourite teams using social media? In what way? As usual comments and feedback are very welcome.

Darren