Ozzie Sport

Perth Glory are an A-League team from Western Australia.  The name is also shared with the W-League team, an affiliate team for the professional women’s team.   There are thirteen people who list the team as an interest. Unlike the Adelaide United, there is a bit less localization of the fanbase: Four are not from Western Australia.  (One does not list a country of residence.)  Two are from New South Wales, one is from Victoria and one is from the United States.  There is also a bit less range in ages of fans compared to Adelaide United fans on LiveJournal.  Of the three who list their year of birth, all list 1987.  Despite the lack of range, the average age is still comparable: 1987.3 versus 1987.  The blogger community on Perth Glory is older by about three years than the LiveJournal community at 26.5.

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• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• Adelaide United on LiveJournal
• Adelaide United on bebo

Adelaide United is a soccer team that plays in the A-League.  On LiveJournal, 10 people list them as an interest.  The community on LiveJournal is very regional.  All 10 people list Australia as their country of residence.  Of the nine who list their state of residence, all are from South Australia.  Of the five who list their city of residence, all are from Adelaide.   The extreme regional pattern of no or little fans outside their state of origin is comparable to blogger where zero fans are outside of SA and on bebo, where 5% or one fan is from outside SA.  This pattern of regional based fanbases is one that appears to extend for much of the A-League that I’ve looked at so far.

Only three list their year of birth: 1985, 1987, 1990.  Their average year of birth is 1987.3 and median year of birth is 1987.  This puts their average age of 23 at slightly older than the United Fans on bebo (20) and younger than the United fans on blogger (26).  This pattern of age group ordering going like has been pretty well established in earlier posts.

The range for most recently updating on LiveJournal is between 1 week and 284 weeks or five and a half years ago.  Four have updated in the past month. Two have updated between between 18 months and 24 months ago.  The remaining four updated between 3.5 and 5.5 years ago.

The fanbase isn’t particularly large any sort of wider conclusion.  It will be interesting though to see if this pattern holds for the rest of the A-League on LiveJournal.

Related Posts:

• Adelaide United on bebo
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
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This is mostly a follow up to Australian Hockey League on blogger, LiveJournal, and LiveJournal clones and Another problem team is problem: Tasmanian Tigers.  I finished looking at the other networks that I’ve been looking at so far: Bebo, Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo!Groups.  Given the size of this league and some of the name issues (two teams sharing names with other, bigger teams), I wasn’t surprised that the size was so tiny on these networks.  There isn’t enough data to provide any sort of meaningful analysis so I’m just providing a table of the size of the communities on the aforementioned networks based on the methodology discussed in other posts.

The AHL has zero presence that I can find on Twitter, which is a bit surprising.  No one appears to even be reporting on them.  They also appear to not have a presence on Facebook.  Developing these two would probably help increase their overall visibility.

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• Australian Hockey League on blogger, LiveJournal, and LiveJournal clones
• Data dump: Australian sport on YouTube
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
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Somewhat surprisingly, no one lists Ainslie Football Club, Belconnen Magpies, Eastlake Football Club, Queanbeyan Tigers, Sydney Swans Reserves or Tuggeranong Hawks as an interest on Facebook.  On Yahoo!Groups, there are no mailing lists dedicated to AFL Canberra or its teams.

What is surprising is the comparatively large size of the AFL Canberra fan community on bebo where, when combined, includes thirteen people.  That’s twelve more than the next nearest network looked at.

Of the six teams, the Tuggeranong Hawks have the most fans at six. Ainslie Football Club, Eastlake Football Club and Queanbeyan Tigers come in second with two fans each.  Belconnen Magpies is fifth with one fan.  The Sydney Swans Reserves are last with zero fans.

The Tuggeranong Hawks fans are the oldest, averaging 21 years of age. Eastlake Football Club is in a close second at 20.5.  Ainslie Football Club and Queanbeyan Tigers have the youngest fans, with their fans being 18.  When people listed their city or state of residence, everyone listed Canberra or a suburb in the ACT.  In  at least two cases for Tuggeranong fans, they listed Canberra and another city.  The other cities included Perth and Batesman Bay.  All the fans of the Queanbeyan Tigers and the Tuggeranong Hawks were male.  This contrasts with Ainslie Football Club and Eastlake Football Club where their two fans were split equally amongst the two gender: One male and one female fan.

The composition of the AFL Canberra fan community is not particularly surprising, except for its youth.  Fans of teams in the league are local.  The population of the community is still small, especially when compared to the AFL on bebo. The gender split feels logical though I can’t clearly articulate why.  Given that it exists, the data fits with other data collected.

Related Posts:

• Data dump: Australian sport on YouTube
• AFL Canberra on LiveJournal clones
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
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The league was discussed in the previous post.  I just don’t want to group too many networks in one post, even if there isn’t much to say.  In this case, while LiveJournal has a much larger comparative Australian audience than LiveJournal clones, the size of the community for AFL Canberra teams is still practically non-existent: Only one person list a team as an interest.  This would be a Belconnen Magpies fan from Melbourne who was born in 1975.  The situation on blogger isn’t much better: No one lists one of these teams as an interest.

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• No Related Posts

AFL Canberra is a local Australian rules football league based in Canberra and affiliated with the AFL.  The teams in the league are Ainslie Football Club, Belconnen Magpies, Eastlake Football Club, Queanbeyan Tigers, Sydney Swans Reserves, and Tuggeranong Hawks. Some of the players in this league have been called up to train with AFL teams and one team is officially affiliated with the Sydney Swans.  The league’s core audience is centered around Canberra, though Wikipedia says the audience has decreased as other sports have grown in popularity.

Given the small size of the potential fanbase for the league and the small size of the communities on LiveJournal clones, the assumption is that the potential interest in the league would be tiny to non-existent.  For Dreamwidth, DeadJournal, InsaneJournal, Blurty, Inksome, CrazyLife and scribbld, this is true.  There are zero people who list any of these teams as an interest on those services.  The single exception to this lack of interest involves a Belconnen Magpies fan on JournalFen. That individual last updated 302 weeks ago and is from the ACT.  They were born in 1975.

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• Data dump: Australian sport on YouTube
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I’m still looking at the NBL and this time, I’m looking at people interested in the teams on Facebook.   Today, using the Create Ad page, I set the variables for all with the exception of the country.  That I set for Australia.  I got the following table:

NBL on Facebook

There aren’t any particular patterns here that can be readily explained such as higher interest in teams from non-major leagues existing outside of Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales.  (Melbourne’s A-League team is first, with Adelaide in second, Sydney in third, Perth in fourth and Brisbane in fifth.)

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There appears to be no New Zealand Breakers, Townsville Crocodiles, Wollongong Hawks  communities on Yahoo!Groups.  Thus, they do not get their own posts.

There are two groups on Yahoo dedicated to the Perth Wildcats: thewildcatsden and  perthwildcatssupportersclub.  Both were created in late 2000.  The first has 56 but has had exclusively spam content since late April 2001.  The second has three members, no real spam content and has had no new posts since April 10, 2001.  Between the two, there were 26 legitimate total posts.  I’m not graphing it because there really isn’t much variation and anything to suggest that for this small community ever really had a presence on the service; a one year pattern is unlikely to correlate with team performance.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
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I haven’t and won’t be doing a separate post for the Cairns Taipans and the Gold Coast Blaze.  There are no communities dedicated to them on Yahoo!Groups.

There are two groups dedicated to the NBL team Melbourne Tigers: melbournetigers and Melb_Tigers.  The first has ten members and was founded on July 4, 2001.  The second has one member and was founded on July 25, 2006.  Melb_Tigers has never had any activity.  melbournetigers in contrast has had a total of six posts, with all posting having stopped by October 18, 2002.  There really isn’t enough activity to speak to any posting trends.

melbournetigers has never had any spam posting and when you look at the membership, it looks like it has been free of spam posters joining.   Only three posters have joined since that activity ended.  Of those three, one is from Victoria, Australia.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
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• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (November 7)

Like the Adelaide 36ers, there is one group on Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the Brisbane Bullets: BrisbaneBullets.  It was created on March 2, 2007 and has three members. It can be found in the Australia category. Unlike the 36ers list, this group has some posting, the first of which was made on November 4, 2008.  Sadly, all this activity is spam related from two people.  It looks like the founder never posted.

Related Posts:

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