Twitter: @NRL followers vs. @AFL followers
I’ve wanted to compare the NRL to the AFL on Twitter for a long time. The problem is that they have a lot of followers. For other teams, based on where our API is right now, there might be 200 to 300 location fields not filled in. In both cases, there are were 6,000+ total followers. Despite having massively improved the tool we’re building, we’re still missing a lot. In terms of the NRL data we gathered on September 2, we’re missing 836 locations. (These may or may not actually result in actual city, state, country locations.) For the AFL data gathered on the same date, we’re missing 351 locations. At this would require several more days worth of work to fix, I figured there was enough data to draw some general conclusions and make a map of the comparative locations of AFL fans versus NRL fans.
For the AFL, the city was determined for 5,879 people who are from 891 unique cities. For the NRL, the city was determined for 3,204 people who are from 493 unique cities. The following table shows the follow count by city and league for all cities+leagues where the city had more than 100 people identified as from that location.
| League | City | State | Location | Count |
| AFL | Melbourne | Victoria | Australia | 2372 |
| NRL | Sydney | New South Wales | Australia | 1145 |
| AFL | Perth | Western Australia | Australia | 443 |
| NRL | Brisbane | Queensland | Australia | 402 |
| AFL | Sydney | New South Wales | Australia | 399 |
| AFL | Adelaide | South Australia | Australia | 369 |
| AFL | Brisbane | Queensland | Australia | 270 |
| NRL | Melbourne | Victoria | Australia | 187 |
| NRL | Gold Coast | Queensland | Australia | 161 |
| NRL | Auckland | Auckland | New Zealand | 110 |
| AFL | Geelong | Victoria | Australia | 102 |
The location follow patterns appear to makes sense given what are the traditional strongholds and relative popularity of each league. (It would be interesting to compare these to the A-League, ANZ Championship, W-League, NBL, WNBL, Super 14/15 and national side related follows to see where cities rank. That map is a project for another day.) When mapped with the location by city+league followed, you get the following:
The map shows that the NRL draws much more heavily in New Zealand than the AFL does. Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania and South Australia are predominately AFL areas of followers; whereas, New South Wales and Queensland are areas of heavy followers for the NRL.
If the location data is broken down by state instead of city, 3,546 NRL and 6,681 AFL followers have an identifiable Australia state. It reaffirms the observed patterns:
| State | NRL | AFL |
| Australian Capital Territory | 107 | 111 |
| New South Wales | 2057 | 724 |
| Northern Territory | 16 | 33 |
| Queensland | 1002 | 587 |
| South Australia | 32 | 565 |
| Tasmania | 12 | 160 |
| Victoria | 280 | 3778 |
| Western Australia | 40 | 723 |
Both teams appear to have strong follower populations international. For the NRL, 4,987 followers have an identified country. For the AFL, there are 8,671 who have an identified country. With the exception of Uruguay, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the AFL has the largest amount of followers by country.
| Location | AFL | NRL |
| Australia | 7720 | 4205 |
| Austria | 3 | |
| Barbados | 1 | |
| Belarus | 2 | |
| Belgium | 1 | |
| Brazil | 16 | 5 |
| Cameroon | 1 | |
| Canada | 58 | 9 |
| Chechnya | 1 | |
| Chile | 4 | |
| China | 26 | 6 |
| Colombia | 1 | |
| Denmark | 1 | |
| Ecuador | 13 | |
| Egypt | 1 | |
| Faroe Islands | 1 | |
| Finland | 1 | |
| France | 14 | |
| Germany | 10 | 3 |
| Greece | 1 | |
| Guyana | 1 | |
| Hungary | 1 | |
| India | 30 | 4 |
| Indonesia | 7 | |
| Iran | 7 | |
| Ireland | 20 | 4 |
| Israel | 4 | 1 |
| Italy | 5 | 1 |
| Japan | 15 | 12 |
| Kazakhstan | 1 | |
| Kenya | 1 | |
| Malaysia | 5 | |
| Marshall Islands | 1 | |
| Mexico | 4 | |
| Nauru | 1 | |
| Nepal | 2 | |
| Netherlands | 5 | 3 |
| New Caledonia | 1 | |
| New Zealand | 35 | 356 |
| Norway | 3 | |
| Philippines | 5 | 1 |
| Portugal | 1 | |
| Qatar | 2 | |
| Romania | 3 | 1 |
| Russia | 4 | |
| Saudi Arabia | 1 | |
| Serbia | 3 | |
| Singapore | 19 | 7 |
| South Africa | 9 | 1 |
| Spain | 4 | 2 |
| Sri Lanka | 1 | |
| Sweden | 6 | 1 |
| Taiwan | 2 | |
| Thailand | 6 | 3 |
| Tonga | 1 | |
| Turkey | 5 | |
| Ukraine | 1 | |
| United Arab Emirates | 12 | 3 |
| United Kingdom | 166 | 218 |
| United States | 392 | 124 |
| Unknown | 667 | |
| Vietnam | 3 | |
| Uruguay | 1 |
With out knowing much, some of this makes sense. It is much easier to watch AFL games in the United States and Canada than it is to watch NRL games. Added to that, the AFL have spent some money trying to develop the sport there. The United Kingdom is a traditional rugby stronghold. New Zealand has an NRL team and doesn’t have an AFL club.
On September 2, I also got follower data for the Socceroos and the ANZ Championship. The scale of followers was much smaller, with something like 4,500 and 250 respectively. For the accounts, I found the mean, median and mode of ReTweets, Followers, Status Updates, Friends, and Listed. This data is on the table below.
| League | Math | Retweeted | Followers | Status Updates | Friends | Listed |
| AFL | Mean | 0.0003 | 152.49 | 559.64 | 223.82 | 5.14 |
| anznetballchamp | Mean | 0 | 92.67 | 652.14 | 179.45 | 4.04 |
| NRL | Mean | 0.0069 | 152.96 | 549.76 | 214.27 | 5.19 |
| Socceroos | Mean | 0 | 294.26 | 978.33 | 386.65 | 10.76 |
| AFL | Median | 0 | 19 | 20 | 60 | 0 |
| anznetballchamp | Median | 0 | 22 | 55 | 94 | 0 |
| NRL | Median | 0 | 19 | 25 | 67 | 0 |
| Socceroos | Median | 0 | 39 | 109 | 114 | 1 |
| AFL | Mode | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| anznetballchamp | Mode | 0 | 1 | 0 | 35 | 0 |
| NRL | Mode | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Socceroos | Mode | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
On the whole, Socceroos fans appear to be more active, have the most followers and follow the most people. If we only look at the NRL and the AFL, the two sets of followers appear to be very close in composition. The average number of followers is separated by one. The total status updates differs by a little more than 10. The total number of friends differs by around 9. The total number of times each follower appears on a list averages less than one. If median and mode are used instead, the differences are similar in that there isn’t a significant difference.
In conclusion, there are distinct geographic patterns for AFL and NRL followers but beyond that, the two types of followers are pretty similar. More analysis can and should be done to see if these patterns hold up country to country, state to state, and city to city.
