In football, thar's gold in them thar tweets

Gossip at last gave way to goals at the weekend. The 31 might not have been a record for an English Premier League opening weekend, but the number of talking points was hard to match.

Just some of the few: Liverpool still struggle to defend against set-pieces; Romelu Lukaku may have found the ideal teammate in Nemanja Matic at Manchester United; Wayne Rooney still has class; and Jonjo Shelvey, captain of Newcastle, will be hard to beat as Stupidest Player of the Season after tramping on an ankle of Tottenham's Dele Alli - and right in front of the ref, nogal.

Talking points in football are more than just talk; they're a lot about money. Daily Mail soccer writer Ian Herbert says a player's value is calculated not only by his skills on the field, but by his Twitter or Instagram feeds off it. When Man U paid R1.5-billion for Paul Pogba, the club would have been aware of the marketing potential of his 16.8million followers on Instagram.

Rooney has 51.6-million Twitter followers and when he joined Everton in the off season the club's tweet quickly went viral. Everton declared that Rooney's return would enable them to reach markets in Southeast Asia and South America that had been beyond them until now.

Kurt Badenhausen, a senior statistics editor at Forbes, reckons the sponsors will rake in the most. Take Cristiano Ronaldo, the Real Madrid superstar, who has 277million followers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, almost twice as many as any other player.

Most of his posts mention his sponsors (Nike, Tag Heuer and Emirates among others). In the past year, according to Hookit, which tracks sponsorship worth across social media for Forbes, Ronaldo shared 580 sponsored posts - twice as many as Neymar and five times as many as Lionel Messi. This would have earned his sponsors about R13-billion in media value. Each of those posts was worth about R22-million in advertising.

This is why football's off-season is no longer for hibernation; it's now a hive of social-media activity. When Pogba signed for United, he put it online and within four hours it had attracted 1.4million viewers. It also explains some of the dynamics behind the outrageous sum of R3.5-billion that Paris Saint-Germain paid for Neymar. Thar's gold in them thar tweets.

On a more prosaic level, the 31 goals at the weekend were a lot, but twice in the recent past there have been more on the opening weekend of the English Premier League. The record is 36 for the 2003-2004 season, boosted by Blackburn's 5-1 hammering of Wolves. Three years later there were 33 goals.

The most in the old First Division was in 1926 when 22 teams provided 52 goals at a rate of 4.73 a game. The best rate was in 1890 when only 10 of the 12 teams were in action: 29 goals at 5.8 a game, slightly skewed by Derby County's 8-5 win over Blackburn. And no one tweeted about it.