On June 11 the world will be united by football — or as we Americans call it, soccer — when the 2010 FIFA World Cup begins in South Africa. The once-in-every-four-years competition has the the tendency to elicit extreme emotions from players and fans alike. This year Facebook will track the latter with its Goal! Leaderboard application.

The application — which was commissioned by FacebookFacebook and built by tech platform Involver — is a ranking of World Cup competitors based on fan passion.

Football fans can show their team/country love with a “Like” and use the sharing power of the 400 million-member social network to spread the word.

The leaderboard is available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese, and countries listed link to their respective Facebook page. Facebook is using each country’s total number of “Likes” and dividing it by its InternetInternet population to calculate a “Passion Index.” Teams are then ranked by their index score, though application users can also filter by other factors like popularity or region.

Goal! Leaderboard is simple, but it has already created a frenzy among football fans across the world, and the most popular countries are getting hundreds of thousands of “Likes.”

As it stands, Italy is the most popular country with 368,760 “Likes,” but the Chilean team has the highest Passion Index when compared with each of other 31 competing countries.

[Img credit: isakaronsson]

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