One of the many major impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the shutdown of live events, with sports, in particular, leaving a gap in the lives of many fans.

Of course, in the broader scheme of things, not being able to watch sports is not a huge inconvenience, but sports do also facilitate an important community-building and interactive purpose. It’s what people talk about, what they do, and without watching sports as a means of escape, its loss can have significant impacts, in many ways.

Which is why enthusiasm about the return of several major sports leagues is now rising. In the coming weeks, we’ll see the return, in altered form, of:

• Major League Baseball (July 23rd)
• NBA (July 30th)
• Champions League (August 12th)
• NFL (September 10th)

Major League Soccer also returned this week. And this is in addition to many international sports leagues which are all working to get back into some semblance of play.

It won’t all go smoothly, as we’ve already seen in some regions, and there’ll be many changes and moderations to these sports as we know them. But having sports back is a big deal – which is also reflected in the rising discussion around such via tweet.

This week, Twitter has provided some new insights into the resurgent sports discussion on its platform, including some interesting data points on specific trends.

You can read Twitter’s full report on the return of sports here, but we’ve compiled the key data points and charts into the below infographic.