The World Cup is nuts. We’re three weeks in now, and South Africa has been engulfed in a wave of absolute lunacy. As was expected, the Dutch have been at the forefront of this madness – including riding a six kilometre-long orange convoy of campers, trucks, busses and jeeps from Pretoria to Durban – but pretty much everyone’s got in on the act.

We’ve seen English fans dressed like extras from the Holy Grail, Mexicans bouncing around in luchador masks, and Italians rocking the Roman Gladiator look. Not forgetting the crazy Saffers in Kim Jong-il costumes.

This unabashed insanity has spread to the net too, and it’s none more evident than on Twitter, where a peak of 2,940 tps (Tweets per second) has seen the Fail Whale appear all too frequently.

So, the question is, how’s FIFA celebrating the event online? Let’s point our browsers over to FIFA.com and take a look.
The first thing you’ll notice is that they’ve completely reskinned their site. It’s now focused exclusively on the World Cup, with fixture information, match previews and reports, photos and videos all at your fingertips.

The home page of the official FIFA website.

There are also extensive team and player profiles and a wealth of facts and figures can be viewed under the statistics section of the site.

View detailed profiles of your favourite soccer players.

These numbers are provided by the Castrol Index, and cover everything from distance covered, to how many passes a player has made and who they’ve passed to. It’s an impressive resource, and one that will pique the interest of any numbers nut or Football Manager fan.

View some stats of the performance of famous soccer players.

Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a World Cup site without some focus on the host country, and fortunately it’s quite jacked up in this regard too.

There’s information on the host cities and stadiums, as well as articles and lists of key sights and activities. You’ll also find a history of football in South Africa, which provides the back-story to both the women’s and men’s games in this country.
 
While all this content is great, the site is a letdown in some respects – the most obvious of which is the actual presentation. It’s distinctly uninspired, and comes across as a by-the-numbers design built to a serious deadline.

Integration with Social Media is also really disappointing, and appears to be restricted to a banner linking to Sepp Blatter’s Twitter profile, while the only way to share photos or videos is through email, which would be totally cool if this were France ’98.
These gripes aside, on the whole it’s a solid effort. Check it out if you haven’t already. Just stay well clear of World Cup Fantasy Football if you’ve got anything planned for the next couple of weeks.

Also check out:

• The Essential (Free) 2010 FIFA World Cup App