Ozzie Sport

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
• New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups

Once again, problem is problem.  This time it involves the New South Wales Blues, a name for the first class cricket team and the Rugby League State of Origin team.  When a search is done for groups on bebo, all of the results are for the Rugby League State of Origin team.  A few of the people on search appeared to have pictures of playing rugby.  None had cricket related pictures.  This suggests that people are fans of the Rugby League team, not the cricket team.  For bebo, the results of this search for this team will thus be slotted for that league, rather than cricket.

Related Posts:

• New South Wales Blues on LiveJournal and its clones
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• New Zealand Sport Census: League popularity on Twitter: Wellington vs. Auckland

I’m playing with Microsoft MapPoint. It is pretty awesome, except for the fact that some smaller cities don’t register. Anyway, I finished compiling the location of all fans of ANZ Champship teams on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones. Interest in this particular competition is small compared to the NRL, AFL and A-League. For a few people, fans didn’t list a city which makes getting an accurate idea of where fans are difficult. Two cities didn’t appear as they were really, really rural so they were excluded. I took this data and the output was the following map.

Australia Test by City 2 1 Adelaide Thunderbirds Melbourne Vixens New South Wales Swifts (Sydney Swifts) Northern Mystics Southern Steel Sydney Swifts

The map has that limited perspective because there were no Queensland based fans. That includes people who just listed state, not city. The same situation existed for Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and Northern Territory.

Related Posts:

• ANZ Championship on Facebook’s fanpages and groups
• ANZ Championship on Facebook
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

The Canterbury Crusaders are a Christchurch, New Zealand rugby team that play in the Super 14 competition. They are discussed here because the competition includes teams from Australia.  For more information on the Super 14, please read Wikipedia’s article.

On bebo, there are 51 fans of the team.  Because most people barracking for the team are Kiwis (77.8% or 28 of the 36 people listing a country of residence), this post will be rather brief without much analysis.  In addition to the Kiwis, the team on bebo has 1 fan from Fiji, 1 from the United Kingdom and 6 from Australia. The six Australians are distributed somewhat equally in the country: 2 from New South Wales, 2 from Queensland, 1 from South Australia and 1 from Western Australia.

25 of the 51 list their age.  Of these, the mean age is 28, median is 26 and mode is 18. The Queensland Reds community on bebo and LiveJournal and the Canterbury Crusaders on blurty, DeadJournal and Dreamwidth are not really big enough to compare age wise as the biggest has three people listing age.  49% or 25 identify as male, 29% or 15 people identify as female and 22% or 11 do not identify as a gender.  Compared to the Queensland Reds bebo community where all 6 identify as male, this community has a huge female population.

Related Posts:

• Socceroos: A creative research data dump (part 3)
• Melbourne Storm on LiveJournal and its clones
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
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I’m going through my data to make sure I can easily find everything by league and city.  Back on January 3, I collected data for the Perth Heat community on bebo and found 27 people who were interested in the team.  If you are an Australian and don’t know who the Perth Heat are, that is understandable.  The Perth based team competes in the Claxton Shield, Australia’s premiere baseball competition.  The competition is a successor to the defunct Australian Baseball League.

Of the 27 people, 15 are female (56%), 11 are male (41%) and 1 does not list a gender (3%).  This 50% female is unique on bebo, with the only other teams looked at so far having that percentage are the female New South Wales Swifts and Central Pulse.  I don’t know enough about baseball in Australia to know why this is so.  I might speculate that the bebo fans may be women related to or involved with men playing on the team.  For Australian rules football in the United States, where the game is not a major one, a lot of the attendees and people interested in teams like the Chicago United, many of the fans are female and connected to the team in some way.  That could account for it.  It may also be something like American expats could be more female and looking for a local team to cheer for that reminds them of home.

The average age of the 19 fans who list their age is 26.5, median age is 27 and mode age is 29.  Fans of the team aren’t that old and look a bit older than some other communities on bebo.

The Perth Heat have an international fanbase on bebo and Twitter:

When I originally did the Twitter table, I thought shenanigans were at play because of the large number of international fans.  Given the bebo data, that Twitter data does not look as questionable.

On bebo,7 Australians identify their state of residence.  (Or it can be easily figured out based on the city they live in.)  Six are in Western Australia and one is in Tasmania.  The Tasmanian is a bit surprising but otherwise, a regional team has a regional audience.  Seems pretty logical.

Of all the networks looked at so far, the largest fanbase for this team is on Facebook with 800, then Twitter with 35 and bebo with 27.  The other services like blogger, LiveJournal and its clones have no other fans.  Bebo’s community is thus the smallest of the existing communities, but also the one with the most easily accessible demographic data.

Related Posts:

• New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups
• Claxton Shield on Twitter
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)

The Central Pulse are a New Zealand based team in the Australian/New Zealand based ANZ Championship, the premiere netball competition in both countries.  Because the presence of Australian teams, it is being covered by this blog.

There is a small community of people listing the team as an interest on bebo.  It consists of four people.  Of these four, all are from New Zealand and all are female.  These two are not surprising given that this a female athletic team and the team is based in New Zealand.

The average and mean age of the three fans listing their age is 21.6 and 21 respectively.  This sample of three is the largest of all the other teams looked at on social networks so far.  With samples of one, the New South Wales Swifts community on LiveJournal, and the Melbourne Phoenix on blogger are both older at 22 and 32.  With samples of one, Adelaide Thunderbirds on bebo, and New South Wales Swifts on bebo are younger at 18 and 20.

Considering the population size of Australia compared to New Zealand, the most surprising thing about this bebo data is that the community is so big at 4 compared to Australian teams with 1.

Related Posts:

• ANZ Championship fandom location on LiveJournal, bebo and blogger
• ANZ Championship on Facebook
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
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I’m slowly trying to get through bebo, like I went through blogger.  I didn’t do these communities earlier because on the whole, bebo communities are bigger.  (I’m putting off LiveJournal even longer because they are about the same size as bebo and each individual profile needs to be viewed get year of birth and location.)  This posts looks at the people who list the Canberra Raiders as an interest on bebo.  The Raiders are National Rugby League team that were founded in 1982. On bebo, 83 people list the team as an interest.

Of these 83,  11 are female (13%), 51 are male (61%) and 21  do not list a gender (25%).   44 list their age.  They have an average age of 23.38, median age of 21 and mode of 19.  This is about 10 years younger than their counterparts on blogger where 5 people list their age for a 34 and median age of 32.5.  (This supports and argument made earlier that there may be age related factors for where a team’s fans congregate.)

46 of the 83 list their place of residence.  Most Raiders fans are Australian, with 42 from the country.  In addition, there are 3 fans from New Zealand and 1 from the United Kingdom. 41 of the 42 Australians list a location where their state of residence can be figured out.  20 are from New South Wales, 10 are from the ACT where the Raiders are based, 9 are from Queensland, 1 is from Victoria and 1 is from Western Australia. The 10 people from the ACT are the largest total following of any team on any network that I have examined so far.  The second closest total is 5 for the Cronulla Sharks on LiveJournal.  Of the 20 from New South Wales, several are from towns outside Sydney where they might do not have an NRL team.  They include one person each from  Batemans Bay, Dubbo, Gilgandra, Harden, Tullibigeal and Stockton, and two from Tumut.  That representation inside New South Wales lends a bit more of a regional feel than if just the ACT is looked at though that much (17 total if Stockon, north of Sydney, is ignored).  The problem with the ACT is the population tends to sometimes view itself as more transient than in other parts of the country.  This could imply that the team should have a wider fan base as people take their love of the team with them when they leave… or more narrow as people who are fans only become fans and only maintain their fannishness for a team while they live in the ACT.  It is hard to tell.

Related Posts:

• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
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In 1999, the Western Suburbs Magpies and Balmain Tigers merged to become the Wests Tigers in the NRL.   The Western Suburbs Magpies are still around under that name for a number of rugby competitions outside that the NRL.   There is a small fan community dedicated to the team on bebo, with five people listing them as an interest.

Of these five, only two list their ages: 21 and 25. That puts their median and average age at 23.  As the NRL team is defunct, these fans would have been rather young to have developed loyalties to the team that would make them hold them all these years younger.  It feels like a safer assumption that these fans are ones who follow the New South Wales Cup team.

Or not.  There are three people who list their location.  Of these, two are from New South Wales, Australia and one is from Auckland, New Zealand.  The presence of the Kiwi is hard to explain if most of these fans are ones who are cheering for the club’s teams in regional rugby competitions.

All five list their gender, with three identifying as male and two identifying as female.  The proportion of females is rather high compared to some teams looked at in earlier posts.  I’m not sure why this would be the case with this defunct NRL team.

Related Posts:

• Wests Tigers on blogger
• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups

The Sydney based Balmain Tigers were part of the National Rugby League and their predecessor, the New South Wales Rugby League.  The team folded in 1999, when they merged with the Western Suburbs Magpies to form the Wests Tigers.  According to Roy Morgan Research, the Wests Tigers are the sixth most popular NRL team in Australia.  This could go a long way towards explaining the comparably large size of the Balmain Tigers fandom on bebo, when compared to other defunct teams such as Gold Coast Chargers, Gold Coast Giants, Gold Coast Seagulls, Illawarra Steelers, Newcastle Rebels, Newtown Jets, North Sydney Bears, Perth Reds, St. George Dragons, Western Reds, and Western Suburbs Magpies.

The number of people listing the Balmain Tigers as an interest on bebo is 11.  The only defunct team with more is St. George Dragons, which has the problem of picking up the current merged name for the St. George Dragons and Illawarra Steelers.  The Newtown Jets as close with 10 people.

The community listing the team as an interest on bebo is mostly male at 64%, with 7 people identifying as male, 3 as female and 1 not identifying.   For Sydney based teams where there are more than 10 fans, Sydney FC and the West Tigers both have a large male audience with 78 and 70% respectively.  (No other Sydney based team so far has more than 10 fans where gender data is available.)   For NRL teams with 10 or more people listing a team as an interest where I have data (see older posts), with the exception of the West Tigers, the other teams all have smaller male audiences: Brisbane Broncos on bebo with 40% male (and 30% unidentified), and Brisbane Broncos on blogger with 58% male.

Only seven of the eleven list their location so that their state and country can be identified.  Of these seven, all are from New South Wales and Australia.

Balmain Tigers fans are older than other NRL and Sydney based teams for which I have data.  Their average age, amongst the five who list their age, is 40.4 with a median age of 43.   For the both categories, the next closest community in age is the Parramatta Eels one on blogger, with an average age of 35.8 and five people listing their age.

The defunct Balmain Tigers have their fans who refuse to give up on their loyalty. Based on bebo, we can guess that they are older, male and local to where the team played.  If there were international fans of a team 10 years gone, those international fans aren’t as interested in expressing their interest in the team.  These patterns make some sense, especially if you factor in the potential for their to be rugby and NRL historians in there.  New South Wales is a base for the sport and the NRL with its major population center.  If there were other fans outside the original core, they would probably be based there.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)

Adelaide United are a team in the A-League and are based in Adelaide, South Australia.  There are 75 people who list Adelaide United as an interest on bebo.   This puts them at about the middle of the pack for number of fans, if they had been in the AFL.  One of the rather unique characteristics of this community compared to some of the other sites we’ve looked at is that group membership is far larger than the number of people listing the team as an interest.

On bebo, 43 or 57% of the fans do not list a gender.   Of the rest, 26 or 35% identify as male and 6 or 8% identify as female.  The huge number of people who do not list gender make it hard to compare to other A-League teams where we have gender related data.   Only the Wellington Phoenix community on blogger comes close with unknown gender, and that’s with 33% with gender not listed.  For Adelaide based teams where we have data, the Adelaide Thunderbirds have 50% with gender unlisted but the community size is two.

There are 18 people who list their age.   Of these, the average age is 20.1, median age is 19 and mode is 20.  This makes them younger than the Adelaide United, Melbourne Victory, Newcastle Jets, Perth Glory, Sydney FC, Wellington Phoenix communities on blogger.  The team closest in age to them is the Melbourne Victory community on blogger, with an average age of 22.8 based on a population of seven.   The next closet community is the Adelaide United community on blogger, at 26 and a population of two.  That’s a difference of almost six years.  (Some of this likely attributed to the fact that bebo tends to skew to a younger audience than blogger.)   The Adelaide team based community is a bit younger than United, but some of this is because the population size is one: Adelaide Thunderbirds on blogger has one fan who is 18 years old and Port Adelaide Power on blogger has one fan who is 15.

The community is overwhelming based in Australia, with 21 of the 75 people listing their country being from the country. No other countries are represented.   This contrasts a bit with the Adelaide United community on blogger, where one person is from China.   This Australian community is also overwhelming from the state that the team plays in, with 19 of the 20 people listing a state being from South Australia.  The other one is from Western Australia.   Of the South Australians, a few are from outside Adelaide with one person each from Barmera, Hallett Cove, and Roseworthy.  This pattern of loyalties for a team being very regional, to the state, is one that exists across the A-League where I have data from blogger.  This may be partially a result of the league not having aged enough for people to take their loyalties with them as they move, or a lack of stars moving from team to team with fans taking their player loyalty with them.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• 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)