Sometimes it seems to be an accepted fact among game developers that players like to cooperate with each other in social gaming; any sort of competition is generally ruled out. But how do you mix that philosophy with the competitiveness of sports? Well, maybe you don’t. At least, not if you’re Bola, which is currently the top soccer game on Facebook.

We’ve reviewed Bola before, but checked back in with developer Three Melons (owned by Playdom) about its progress in light of the ongoing World Cup tournament. Despite our somewhat lukewarm review, Bola has found about 4.2 million monthly active users, and Three Melons says the game claims a combined one million daily active users between Facebook and Orkut.

Part of Bola’s allure is that the game encourages the sort of jibing that real-world soccer fans aim at each other. “We’re stressing the humorous approach,” says Marcos Amadeo, Bola’s product manager. The game tracks stats carefully in part to make it easier for friends to tease each other’s records, and players can also prank each other’s stadiums. “We chose friendly banter over collaboration,” Amadeo says.

Players are also taking to the in-game advertising, which doubles as a core part of Bola’s revenue. The game has partnerships with Coca-Cola, Allianz Insurance, Ford, Nike, Nestle, and other brands, which can be picked up by players as their team sponsors. Several soccer games have had luck getting high-profile marketing deals in this way — something that seems mainly confined to the sports category for now, aside from a few outliers like Zynga’s 7-Eleven partnership.

Another notable point is that Bola is already available in three languages: English, Portuguese and Spanish (Three Melons is based in Argentina). The company is benefiting from its ownership by Playdom by sharing some localization work with Merscom, another Playdom acquisition.

One thing we’ll note here is that soccer games haven’t grown nearly as much during the World Cup as one might have expected. Bola has continued to acquire users at a slow pace; EA’s FIFA Superstars has taken in 2.3 million MAU with the help of advertising, but that’s not too impressive in light of the numbers that, for instance, FrontierVille has racked up in just a couple weeks.

But for now, Bola is leading the pack, and there’s still the possibility that growth in the soccer category will pick up as Facebook acquires more international users. And Amadeo points out one advantage that soccer has: unlike the popular sports in the US, soccer season never really ends. After the World Cup is over, growth can still go on.