What is Facebook Sports Stadium?

Facebook is giving you a new way to celebrate with your fellow sports fans online. It’s called Facebook Sports Stadium, a new feature the platform introduced inside the Facebook smartphone app. To get to it, all you need to do is search for a specific game, and you’re ready to go. Facebook product manager Steve Kafka writes that Facebook will unveil other ways to access it over time.

According to him, Facebook Sports Stadium is a dedicated place to experience sports in real-time with your friends and the world. With 650 million sports fans, Facebook is the world’s largest stadium. People already turn to Facebook to celebrate, commiserate, and talk trash with their friends and other fans. Now we’ve built a place devoted to sports so you can get the feeling you’re watching the game with your friends even when you aren’t together. People already use Facebook to share their thoughts and snarky jabs about their favorite sporting events; now there’s a dedicated place for them to do so.

Facebook Sports Stadium will host comments on games from the fans and the professional commentators alike. It seems to want to be the best place to find information on a game, immediately behind watching the live game itself. Users will have access to live scores, statistics, and even find the information on where to watch it on TV. And just as friends can “like” your witty status updates, you’ll be able to like your favorite team’s plays over the course of a game.

With Facebook Sports Stadium, all the content on Facebook related to the game is in one place, and it comes in real time and appears chronologically. You can see:

• Posts from your friends, and their comments on plays
• Posts and commentary from experts, like teams, leagues and journalists, with easy access to their Pages
• Live scores, stats and a play-by-play
• Game info, like where to find the game on TV

You can follow the action as the game unfolds with a live play-by-play, and even like, comment on, and share individual plays. You can also get up to speed quickly with live scores and the most discussed plays. It’s a second-screen experience that we hope makes watching the broadcast even better. You can get to Facebook Sports Stadium by searching for the game, and we’ll surface new ways to get there as the product evolves.

Sports is a global interest that connects people around the world. This product makes connecting over sports more fun and engaging, and we will continue listening to feedback to make it even better.

We’re rolling this out today for American football games and will support other sports around the world like basketball, soccer, and more soon. The experience is available now on iPhone in the US, and will expand to other platforms in the coming weeks.

As Sports Stadium is all rolled into Facebook’s conventional app, it represents an effort by the social giant to keep users engaged within its software, rather than lose users to get their sports fix from other apps. Want to see how it works? Watch this video.