CALIFORNIA: Facebook has big news for sports fans—and potentially bad news for ESPN and Twitter.

Just in time for the Super Bowl, Facebook announced it’s launching a new feature called “Sports Stadium” that pits itself against Twitter’s key strength as a popular destination for scrolling commentary during games.

In addition to getting live scores, stats and updates, Facebook users can trade trash talk with fellow fans and track live commentary from experts and journalists, the company said.

Facebook’s new service marks a fresh bid to attack Twitter in its real-time event-tracking niche — a key area in which Twitter still holds an advantage.

Facebook’s sports feature kicks off with the NFL this weekend for the AFC and NFC Championship games. Facebook said the new feature will support “other sports around the world like basketball [and] soccer.”

Facebook’s sports service isn’t partnering with any content providers for the launch, but is getting its game data from Sportradar.

“You can follow the action as the game unfolds with a live play-by-play, and even like, comment on and share individual plays,” a Facebook product manager wrote in a blog post. “You can also get up to speed quickly with live scores and the most discussed plays.”

The service, which will be available for iPhone users this weekend, will be rolled out to Android phones and desktop computers “in the coming weeks,” Facebook said.

The launch follows Twitter’s rollout last fall of its “Moments” feature, which aggregates tweets, photos and videos from sports matches as well as news events.

The threat could be especially scary for Twitter given Facebook’s sheer size. This week, Facebook claimed there are 650 million sports fans among its 1.5 billion monthly active users.

By comparison, Twitter has 320 million monthly active users.