The Green Bay Packers have more online buzz, but the Pittsburgh Steelers may have more web fans this season according to The Nielsen Company. Football fan discussion of the two teams was measured on blogs, message boards, Facebook and Twitter in the week ahead of the NFL championship game between January 25 and February 1.

The two Sunshine State candidates dominate opponents in the midterm election ad wars.

According to The Nielsen Sports Media Exposure Index, the Cowboys were still the most popular NFL team in America last season.

According to a week-long buzz study conducted by NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey Company, the New York Knicks, the Chicago Bulls, and the Cleveland Cavaliers have all been the most closely linked teams to King James for at least one day.

After a weekend of two “blown” calls by referees in World Cup matches, Nielsen found that two out of three respondents (65 percent) to Nielsen’s online survey of 55 countries were in favor of a change. Only about one in 10 people globally said the ban on the use of video replays should stay, and the others didn’t mind either way.

No other World Cup controversy compares to the one issue that’s the talk of U.S. soccer fans across the online community: red cards.

Thanks to a goalkeeping blunder in the 40th minute, the United States escaped with a 1-1 draw versus England on Saturday. The player responsible for the mistake, England’s Robert Green, was not only pulled from relative obscurity into the social media spotlight, but his error has helped to fan the flames of World Cup fever in the US.

As the planet awaits the world’s biggest single sporting event, most of the pre-tournament World Cup Buzz is focused around the players who won’t be taking part or could be missing out. The Nielsen Company analyzed English-language online blogs, message boards and social networking sites and found that pre-World Cup player buzz was dominated by injuries.

Nike is not an official World Cup sponsor but, thanks to some creative marketing, that doesn’t stop consumers across the globe from linking the company to the world’s largest soccer tournament. The Nielsen Company analyzed online blogs, message boards and social networking sites and found that the sports shoe and apparel giant was more frequently linked to the World Cup than any of the tournament’s official partners and sponsors.

San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s earn highest online sentiment scores among all MLB teams through the first three weeks of the regular season.