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This data was gathered on May 30, 2010.  It includes non-Australian teams that compete in Australian based leagues.  It also contains Australian some athlete accounts where the athlete competes for a club in an Australian based league.

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I’m trying to make a map of Australian sports fandom across various social networks.  This is going to take a long time and require a long explanation to understand exactly what you’re seeing.  This map isn’t intended to be all comprehensive.  I’m still collecting data and will likely continue to collecting data for a long time.    That’s why a long explanation is needed.

Country League Rugby: Group 21 is represented exclusively by the Facebook group SCONE THOROUGHBREDS RUGBY LEAGUE CLUB. Location was identified the location of the school network members listed themselves as belonging to.

For the NWBL, amongst the social networks I’ve checked so far, only You!Tube had people who listed the league.  And that was one person.  There were several people on Facebook who belonged the Wollongong Roller Hawks group and listed a network which I could affiliate with a city.

The AHL is represented by a Facebook group for the Tassie Tigers and three people on bebo. There were no fans on LiveJournal’s clones or blogger.

The AFL includes full data from 43things, bebo, blogger, eacademy, Daniel Jackson – TIGER TUFF!, Law Hawks and No matter how bad they are, I will still barrack for the Richmond Tigers! groups on Facebook, Gaia Online (but no one was an AFL fan who listed a city), LiveJournal and its clones, only Collingwood from MySpace profile search, only Brisbane Lions, Collingwood Magpies and Carlton Blues from orkut, only the scrapheap_afl mailing list on Yahoo!groups, and only the Geelong Cats on YouTube.

For the NRL, the following Facebook groups were included: Matt Johns to coach the Newcastle Knights in 2010! , Wests Tigers NYC and Melbourne-based Wests Tigers Fanatics. Only the Brisbane Broncos were looked at on 43things. Every team was searched for on bebo, blogger, Gaia Online, LiveJournal and its clones. The sample is much smaller than the AFL. (Though the community on bebo is much larger than AFL community on bebo. It might sort of make up for that.)

WNBL totals came from YouTube, MySpace, eacademy, bebo and LiveJournal clones.

For the NBL, only the Brisbane Bullets were looked at on 43 things. On Facebook for the NBL, unlike for most leagues looked at, an attempt was made to find every group connected to the team. Thus, the following groups and fanpages are represented: Townsville McDonald’s Crocodiles, Adelaide 36ers, Adelaide 36ers are the greatest team of ANY kind EVER!!, Adelaide 36ers Fan Zone, Bring Allen Iverson to the Adelaide 36ers!, Bring Dusty Rychart back to the Adelaide 36ers ~ beg, plead, grovel ;p, Cairns Taipans , Croc Nation, Early 90′s Perth Wildcats appreciation group, Gold Coast Blaze, Melbourne Tigers, melbourne tigers are the best team, Melbourne Tigers Basketball Club, Melbourne Tigers cheer squeda east and south ends , Melbourne Tigers NBL HUMMER CHAMPIONS 2007/08, Melbourne Tigers NBL supporters, New Zealand Breakers, Official Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats (Catties Fans), SAVE OUR MELBOURNE TIGERS NBL TEAM , THIS SEASON., Save Our South Dragons:www. saveourdragons.com, South Dragons 2008/09 Nbl Champions, South Melbourne Dragons, The Melbourne Tigers Fan Group, The Official Adelaide 36ers Page, Townsville McDonald’s Crocodiles and Wollongong Hawks. If this was done with other clubs and leagues, the representation for the AFL and NRL would probably be much, much bigger. Every team was looked at on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and its clones. It also includes members of melbournetigers on Yahoo!Groups.

For the VFL, only the Geelong Cats and Coburg Tigers were checked. On MySpace, Frankston Dolphins , Sandringham Zebras , Werribee Tigers , Collingwood Magpies and Geelong Cats were checked. All teams were checked on LiveJournal and its clones, blogger and bebo.

A-League is represented by a search of all teams on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and its clones. Orkut was searched for Melbourne Victory fans. It might not show up on the first version of this map because after about seven layers, the mapping software gets slow.

Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location map

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Interesting to see what networks have what populations.  The WNBL is only really an interest on 2 networks while the AFL is present on every network.  These networks all have different population sizes so total numbers is really apple to oranges in some ways.  I then decided to rank the leagues by how popular they were on each network.  The most popular league ranks 1, the next most popular league ranks 2.  If there is a tie, they share the same rank.  The results of that are in the following table:

This table is a bit more interesting.  Across most networks, the AFL is the most popular league.  The NRL is the second most popular league.  First class cricket, compromising state cricket teams, is the third most popular.  The A-League and Super 14 are close behind.  When you get down near the bottom, patterns become interesting.  The WNBL is not as popular as Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.  This is largely a result of the large number of fans on Facebook.  AFL Canberra is also more popular than the VFL.  This is because of the high rank on JournalFen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues lists the attendance by league for six Australian sports leagues in 2009.  I cannot find a better list of attendance data for Australian sports league, especially the minor leagues.  That makes the rest of this analysis a bit problematic but moving forward anyway… This data is then put into the following table:

For total number of people attending during the course of a season, it certainly seems to track with the average league rank on the social networks in this sample.  Total people and total attendance seems to track some too.  I ran the correlation to confirm these observations:

Total attendance does correlate meaningfully.  Average attendance isn’t as meaningful but the correlation is still relatively strong.  There is a relationship there.

I’ve found that similar relationships exist with American baseball teams.  The issue of course is: Cause and effect.  Does high fan attendance lead to more fans listing their teams as an interest on social media? Or does becoming interested in a team on social media sites lead people to attending games?  It feels like the first but I have no evidence either way.

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I recorded if it was the official team account, or an unofficial account.  Unofficial accounts are player, management or fansite accounts.  I also recorded the number of followers an account had.  Who are the most popular players on Twitter?  What are the most popular teams?

One thing that surprised me was that not every team had an official account.  It seems like they should have one, if only to squat on it to protect their future potential assets.

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In comparison, the NBL appears to have a large number of players on Twitter.  In some cases, the players appear to be at have decided to have staked out their own user name, if only to have it.  Some engage but many don’t have images.  A few have their tweets protected.  Most don’t have branded backgrounds or even list that they are playing in the NBL.

That’s a big difference.  Is this a result of league policy regarding the use of social media?  Or is it a difference in sports culture, where NBL basketball players are say modeling NBA players and A-League players are emulating their European and America peers who appear to be less active on social networks?

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While teams from many leagues were looked at, not all those teams had people listing them as an interest and where the individual listed their city of residence. The following leagues did though: AFL, AFL Canberra, A-League, ANZ Championship, First class cricket, NBL, NRL, NSW Premier League, Rugby League/State of Origin, Super 14, and Victorian Amateur Football Association. To make the map more readable, some of the least represented leagues were left off the map.

The following map was created using MapPoint:

Play by City 220 15 1 AFL A-League NBL NRL Super 14

The map clearly shows a geographic preference in New South Wales for the NRL.  Victoria clearly prefers the AFL.  The rest of the country tends to also support the AFL.  The pattern of geographic distribution for fans of these leagues appears to fit patterns I have seen described elsewhere.  It will be interesting to see if these patterns hold for bebo.

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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 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.

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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.

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That said, I searched for the Adelaide 36ers on Yahoo!Groups.  There is one list dedicated to the team: 36ers. It was created on March 19, 2003.  It has one member and there have never been any posts to the list.  The list appears in the general basketball category.

Even with one member, the community size on Yahoo!Groups is bigger than that of the LiveJournal clones.

It will be interesting to see how the size of the community here compares to the other NBL teams.

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One thing to note before looking at this, I’ve again excluded non-Australian and non-Kiwi members. If I was doing work for these teams professionally though? I would really target international student populations at the major universities and at high schools where there are high school exchange students. It looks like these fans account for a fair amount of fans on Facebook. Once they leave Australia though, those fans begin to lose value as the chance to monetize them is much less effective. They can add numbers to official Facebook fan pages but they aren’t likely to generate revenue. If a team’s goal is to convert people into potential ticket buyers, this is a problem. (For leagues such as the NRL and AFL where there is an international television agreement, I’d advise them make occasional posts reminding their non-native audience how they can tune in, encourage them to demand that their local satellite and cable providers give them access to these games to watch.)

Onwards with maps…

NBL fandom by state 220 110 0 Adelaide 36ers Cairns Taipans Gold Coast Blaze Melbourne Tigers New Zealand Breakers Perth Wildcats South Melbourne Dragons Townsville Crocodiles Wollongong Hawks

NBL by city 70 8 1 Adelaide 36ers Melbourne Tigers New Zealand Breakers Perth Wildcats South Melbourne Dragons Townsville Crocodiles Wollongong Hawks

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