2015 RWC’s most popular players

England and Wales 2015 is set to be the biggest Rugby World Cup to date, with attendance levels for the group stages already consistently breaking records. Ireland’s match with Romania has drawn the biggest crowd so far, with the 90,000 capacity Wembley being filled with 89,267 fans.

This breaks the previous record of 89,019 set just a week earlier at England vs Argentina, which in turn had overtaken the 82,957 fans in attendance at the tournament’s 2003 final.

It’s not just at the stadiums where records are being broken, and online RWC15 is the most talked about Rugby competition so far. But which team’s fans are doing the most talking?

To find out, Stay Sourced have taken a look at the twitter followers for each team’s predicted starting XV, and pitted them against each other in this “Social World Cup”. It turns out that Ireland’s squad easily win the social popularity contest, with over 1.7 million followers. The All Black’s come a close runners up with just over 1.08 million, whereas England drop out in the quarter finals with a combined 607,303 twitter followers.

Although they come a close second overall, Stay Sourced work out that Sonny Bill Williams is the cup’s most popular player, with over 444k followers and counting, heading up their “Social dream team”.

Also included in the infographic are some more general stats looking at the expected economic impact of the tournament, and the drinks consumption across each host stadium; take a look below.