I looked at the most popular teams on Facebook for the AFL. Now it is time for the NRL. The following is based on the official Facebook pages that are linked on a team’s official site. If a team is not listed, it is because they did not provide a link to their official Facebook page or provided a bad link. This data was gathered on April 6, 2010.
What’s the most popular AFL team on Facebook? That really does depend on how you measure it.
The following table has a column for total people listing a team as an interest, total number of members of the largest fan page dedicated to a team, total number of fans of the largest page dedicated to a team and the grand total. This information was collected in the past three days.
| Team | Interest | Page | Group | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collingwood Magpies | 59800 | 80 | 7969 | 67849 |
| West Coast Eagles | 26020 | 33501 | 5094 | 64615 |
| Carlton Blues | 58120 | 317 | 1626 | 60063 |
| Adelaide Crows | 50020 | 1579 | 5827 | 57426 |
| Fremantle Dockers | 43660 | 96 | 3625 | 47381 |
| Sydney Swans | 21260 | 18094 | 4737 | 44091 |
| Hawthorn Hawks | 21220 | 2602 | 6595 | 30417 |
| Essendon Bombers | 27920 | 248 | 1989 | 30157 |
| Richmond Tigers | 13960 | 11727 | 2782 | 28469 |
| Geelong Cats | 15760 | 5092 | 3976 | 24828 |
| Brisbane Lions | 10940 | 10556 | 2302 | 23798 |
| St. Kilda Saints | 15480 | 317 | 4281 | 20078 |
| Port Adelaide Power | 6100 | 9766 | 3157 | 19023 |
| North Melbourne Kangaroos | 9120 | 4314 | 2420 | 15854 |
| Western Bulldogs | 2740 | 4745 | 7295 | 14780 |
| Melbourne Demons | 5940 | 4057 | 4003 | 14000 |
| Gold Coast Football Club | 1200 | 1720 | 66 | 2986 |
And then I completed this and realized the biggest fan pages I had? They weren’t the official ones. Time to get the official ones, where the total fans are much bigger, and then update.
Green: Indicates official Facebook fanpage has the most fans.
Blue: Indicates a page not linked on the official page has the most fans.
Red: Indicates an official Facebook fanpage was not found to be linked to on the Club’s official site.
Black: AFL does not link to an official page for the team.
Fixed. As an American, I’m used to professional team names being City Mascot. When I search, this tends to be my default mode of searching. It can screw up results and I have to remember to search all variations to make sure this doesn’t happen. When I was just looking for biggest, I didn’t. Woe. But anyway, these results should hopefully be a bit more accurate. I went to every team’s official site that was linked on the AFL’s site. On the official site, I looked for their official Facebook fanpage accounts. Then I took that information and added it to the above table to get a more accurate picture. If an unofficial fanpage had more fans than the official one? I left the unofficial one. I’ve color coded that chart to make easy to see where I did that.
Yesterday, I made a post about the most popular Australian athlete, league and team related Twitter accounts.
On Twitter, @anthonyalsop pointed me to a list of Australian athletes on Twitter he had created. I had missed quite a few on his list and some of those accounts led me to lists where I found additional athletes, teams and leagues. All told, I added about 61 new rows of data. There are a few repeats from yesterday’s list as I updated some numbers. (Historical twitter growth for athletes would be interesting to look at and there are tools for just that. It is a project for a different day. Maybe.) There doesn’t appear to be much change.
Things to remember with this list: It does not include athletes who do not play for team based sports. Swimmers, golfers, tennis players, surfers and race car drivers are not on the list. It also does not include Australian athletes playing for teams outside of Australia. This includes cyclists (who are probably the most popular Australian athletes that I can find) as they often compete for teams outside Australia. It does not include Australian NBA and WNBA players. It also does not include retired Australian athletes, unless they are now involved in a management role with a specific team. National teams are included but players are generally sorted by their other playing affiliation. This list does include athletes and teams from outside Australia when the league has teams from other countries. Thus, South Africa is represented with its Super 14 teams and New Zealand is included with a variety of teams in leagues such as the NRL, Super 14 and the NBL.
Updated this list on the 11th to include the Australian Opals thanks to a comment by @SportingSheilas.
An updated version of this list can be found at Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
This is sorted by total number of followers. If an account is tagged (unofficial), it indicates that it is not the official account; it belongs to management, a player or a fansite. The list includes teams from most of the major sports leagues in Australia. Teams that play in those leagues that are not from Australia have also been included. Players were only counted as belonging to a team if they currently play for it. (Some players that are on NRL player lists have gone to play in Europe. They aren’t included.) The date that the information was collected is also included as these numbers actively change over time. If some one/team/organization is listed twice, it is because the data was collected on multiple dates.
This post looks at the geographic distribution of various fans by location inside Australia. The maps were created using Google’s Fusion Tables. The data is based on this table, which includes bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones. The totals by city were added together. (So if there were 2 bebo fans and 1 blogger fan from a city, the total will be 3.) (United Kingdom and United States data has been filtered out.) These tables will not likely be updated. Rather, this data will probably appear in a new table and graphs when more data is added. Please read the Google created legend carefully.
Adelaide Crows
Brisbane Lions
Geelong Cats
Port Adelaide Power
Adelaide United
Sydney FC
Brisbane Bullets
Brisbane Broncos
Canberra Raiders
Canterbury Crusaders
There are only two fans of the team on bebo, so this almost doesn’t deserve a post of its own. Nonetheless, it gets one. The Fitzroy Lions were one of the original teams in the Victoria Football League. In 1996, they merged with the Brisbane Bears to become the Brisbane Lions. Through a series of events, the Fitzroy Football Club replaced their mascot, the Lion, merged with the University Reds and became known as the Fitzroy Reds and now play in the Victorian Amateur Football Association. That history explains why the Fitzroy Lions have a message board dedicated to them on Yahoo!Groups that dates back 2000. Of the two fans on bebo, only one lists profile information: Male, 45 and from Perth, Western Australia.
As their incarnation as the Fitzroy Reds, they lack fans listing them as an interest on bebo, all LiveJournal clones, blogger. There are no Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the team. The only place where they have a some one listing them as an interest on LiveJournal. That person has not updated in 213 weeks and is from Melbourne.
People appear uninterested in defunct teams or small, amateur teams of which the Fitzroy Lions are both.
I’ve finished tallying the number of fans by team for blogger. The following chart is sorted by most popular teams first, least popular teams last.
| State | League | Interest | Blogger | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | AFL | Sydney Swans | 34 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Collingwood Magpies | 22 | |
| Western Australia | AFL | West Coast Eagles | 22 | |
| New South Wales | A-League | Sydney FC | 18 | |
| South Australia | AFL | Adelaide Crows | 14 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Brisbane Broncos | 12 | |
| Queensland | AFL | Brisbane Lions | 12 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Geelong Cats | 12 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Western Bulldogs | 12 | |
| Victoria | A-League | Melbourne Victory | 11 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Essendon Bombers | 10 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Wests Tigers | 10 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks | 8 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Parramatta Eels | 8 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Sydney Roosters | 8 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | South Sydney Rabbitohs | 6 | |
| South Australia | A-League | Adelaide United | 5 | |
| Western Australia | AFL | Fremantle Dockers | 5 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Melbourne Demons | 5 | |
| Western Australia | A-League | Perth Glory | 5 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Richmond Tigers | 5 | |
| Australian Capital Territory | NRL | Canberra Raiders | 4 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Carlton Blues | 4 | |
| Victoria | NRL | Melbourne Storm | 4 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Newcastle Knights | 4 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | St. George Illawarra Dragons | 4 | |
| Victoria | AFL | St. Kilda Saints | 4 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Hawthorn Hawks | 3 | |
| Victoria | AFL | North Melbourne Kangaroos | 3 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Penrith Panthers | 3 | |
| New Zealand | A-League | Wellington Phoenix | 3 | |
| Queensland | NBL | Brisbane Bullets | 2 | |
| New Zealand | NRL | Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs | 2 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Gold Coast Titans | 2 | |
| Victoria | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | Melbourne Phoenix | 1 | |
| New Zealand | NRL | New Zealand Warriors | 1 | |
| New South Wales | A-League | Newcastle Jets | 1 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Newtown Jets (defunct) | 1 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | North Sydney Bears (defunct) | 1 | |
| South Australia | AFL | Port Adelaide Power | 1 | |
| Queensland | Brisbane Netball Association | ACE Netball Club | 0 | |
| South Australia | NRL | Adelaide Rams (defunct) | 0 | |
| South Australia | ANZ Championship | Adelaide Thunderbirds | 0 | |
| Australian Capital Territory | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | AIS Canberra Darters | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Annandale Dales (defunct) | 0 | |
| Australia | Netball Australia | Australian Diamonds (national team) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Balmain Tigers (defunct) | 0 | |
| Western Australia | Claxton Shield | Barbagallo Perth Heat | 0 | |
| Queensland | A-League | Brisbane Roar | 0 | |
| New Zealand | Super 14 | Canterbury Crusaders | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Canterbury Tactix | 0 | |
| New South Wales | A-League | Central Coast Mariners Football Club | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Central Pulse | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Cumberland (defunct) | 0 | |
| Victoria | Victorian Amateur Football Association | Fitzroy Lions | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Glebe Dirty Reds (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Gold Coast Chargers (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | AFL | Gold Coast Football Club | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Gold Coast Giants (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Gold Coast Seagulls (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | A-League | Gold Coast United | 0 | |
| New South Wales | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | Hunter Jaegers | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Hunter Mariners (defunct) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Illawarra Steelers (defunct) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles | 0 | |
| Victoria | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | Melbourne Kestrels | 0 | |
| Victoria | ANZ Championship | Melbourne Vixens | 0 | |
| New South Wales | ANZ Championship | New South Wales Swifts (Sydney Swifts) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Newcastle Rebels (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | North Queensland Cowboys | 0 | |
| Queensland | A-League | North Queensland Fury FC | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Northern Eagles (defunct) | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Northern Mystics | 0 | |
| Victoria | Plenty Valley Netball Association | Orcas Netball | 0 | |
| Western Australia | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | Perth Orioles | 0 | |
| Western Australia | NRL | Perth Reds (defunct) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | Netball New South Wales | Petersham RUFC Netball Club | 0 | |
| Queensland | AHL | Queensland Blades | 0 | |
| Queensland | KFC Twenty20 Big Bash | Queensland Bulls | 0 | |
| Queensland | ANZ Championship | Queensland Firebirds | 0 | |
| Queensland | Rugby League/State of Origin | Queensland Maroons | 0 | |
| Queensland | Claxton Shield | Queensland Rams | 0 | |
| Queensland | Super 14 | Queensland Reds | 0 | |
| Queensland | Gridiron Australia Nationals | Queensland Sundevils | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | South Queensland Crushers (defunct) | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Southern Steel | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | St. George Dragons (defunct) | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic | 0 | |
| Western Australia | ANZ Championship | West Coast Fever | 0 | |
| Western Australia | NRL | Western Reds (defunct) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Western Suburbs Magpies (defunct) | 0 |
What I didn’t find all that surprising was the dominance of AFL teams at the top. They have eight of the twelve spots for teams with double digit fans on their service. Of the remaining four spots, two are for the A-League and two are for the NRL. The presence of the A-League feels a bit surprising as I didn’t think that soccer was that popular in Australia, at least compared to the NRL. I do recall a fair amount of advertising for the A-League and they are beginning to build more soccer purpose built stadiums in Australia.
For the 28 teams with 1 to 9 fans, all are from the NRL, AFL or A-League with the exception of the Melbourne Phoenix who played in the Commonwealth Bank Trophy. I am a bit surprised that some of the more popular netball teams on Facebook, Twitter and bebo didn’t make the list for blogger. I’m not surprised that other leagues didn’t make the list as most of these leagues are for secondary sports.
There are 227 total listings for people who list a team as an interest. (There may be duplicates, where a person lists more than one team as an interest.) Of the population, 144 or 63% identify themselves as male, 63 or 28% identify themselves as female and 20 or 9% do not identify a gender. This feels in line with how sports fandom tends to be depicted when looked at by gender: Male dominant but with a growing female demographic.
Of the 227, only 154 listed their birthdate and had their astrological sign displayed. The distribution amongst various astrological signs is pretty even with the smallest representation at 7 or 5% for Taurus and the largest at 17 or 11% for Pisces. The distribution for specific teams is much less even, but much of this can be attributed to the small sample size.
142 of he 227 list their age when problematic ages, like 253, are removed. The oldest fans are those for the Richmond Tigers, who average 41.6 years. This community is small though, with only three people listing their age. The Parramatta Eels have the oldest average age for a team with five or more people who list their age. Their average age is 35.8. The NRL and AFL are evenly distributed for teams with the oldest fans. Penrith Panthers has the youngest average fan age at 18, but the population size is only one. For a team with five or more people listing them as an interest, the Melbourne Victory win with an average age of 22.8.
167 fans list an Australian state of residence. (There may be more Australian in this sample but they don’t necessarily list their state.) The most popular state for sports fans on blogger listing an Australian team as an interest in New South Wales, with 62 people. Victoria is second with 43. Queensland is third with 28. Western Australia is fourth with 15. South Australia is fifth with 11. The ACT has 5, Tasmania has 2 and the Northern Territory has 1. In the ACT, the most popular team is the Brisbane Lions with 2 fans. In New South Wales, Syndey FC is the most popular team with 16 fans. The Roosters are the second most popular with 7 fans, which is a pretty big difference between the most popular and second most popular teams. The Collingwood Magpies are the most popular team in the Northern Territory with 1 fan. The Brisbane Lions are the most popular team in Queensland with 7 fans. The Broncos are the second most popular with 4 fans. The Adelaide Crows are the most popular team in South Australia with 8 fans. The only other team listed as an interest by people listing the state as their place of residence were Adelaide United of the A-League. No NRL team interested people from that state. From Tasmania, 1 person listed the Geelong Cats as an interest and 1 person listed the Richmond Tigers as an interest. In Victoria, the Collingwood Magpies were the most popular team with 12 people listing them as an interest. The second most popular team with 7 fans was Melbourne Victory. In Western Australia, there are two most popular teams: Fremantle Dockers and Perth Glory with 5 fans each. There is no second most popular team. The other five people from the state evenly distribute their interest with one fan for five teams. I don’t feel well enough informed at this point to know if this reflects on existing regional sports fandom patterns.
Based on the somewhat data I have so far from Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and its clones, blogger and bebo, the Melbourne Victory are one of the most popular teams in Australia. They are only behind Collingwood Magpies, Carlton Blues, and the Queensland Maroons. A lot of this is attributed to the 46,620 people who list the team as an interest on Facebook and 1,432 people following the team on Twitter.
So far, only 28 teams have been looked at on blogger and here, the Victory fall in the middle of the pack with only 11 people listing them as an interest. Most of the sampling on the network has involved the AFL and Queensland based teams. Teams ahead of the Victory include Sydney Swans, Collingwood Magpies, West Coast Eagles, Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Lions, Geelong Cats, and the Western Bulldogs.
What does this small community look like? Of the eleven, nine list their country of residence. Of these nine, eight are Australians and one is likely an Australian who is currently traveling the United States. Of the nine Australians, seven list their state of origin and they are all from Victoria, six listing Melbourne as their home and one listing St. Kilda as theirs. This is a team that draws, at least on blogger, from where it is based and does not have a larger, national following.
Seven people list their age. For mean, median and mode, age is the same: 22. This is a relatively young fan community, especially when compared to a few of the AFL team communities on blogger. The community is also a more likely to be male with 6 people identifying as male, 3 identifying as female and 2 not identifying. Between the Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Bullets, Brisbane Lions, Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies, Essendon Bombers, Fremantle Dockers, Geelong Cats, Hawthorn Hawks, Melbourne Demons, and North Melbourne Kangaroos communities, only the Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies and Geelong Cats communities have a smaller female fanbase.
It will be interesting to see how this community eventually compares to other A-League teams on the network.
The following chart is based on the data gathered for posts to date. It is intended to give a general idea as to the comparative size of various sports fandom communities to each other. Blanks indicate that no data regarding that team on the service has been gathered; it does not indicate a size of zero for that particularly service. If you would like specific data regarding a team on a service to understand where that number of coming from, please comment or e-mail me at laura[at]fanhistory[dot]com. I am more than happy to explain it.
Leagues with teams at the bottom include AFL, AHL, A-League, Claxton Shield, Gridiron Australia Nationals, KFC Twenty20 Big Bash, NBL, Rugby League/State of Origin, Victorian Amateur Football Association. The AFL’s expansion team puts one of their teams in the bottom 10. Soccer teams, baseball teams, American/Gridiron football, basketball, netball, rugby union, ice hockey, rugby league and Australian rules football are at the bottom. Some of these sports can be accounted for because of they are not popular sports in the country. Others can be accounted for because the teams are part of secondary leagues and competitions. It will be interesting to see how and if popularity shifts as more data is added from additional networks.
Edited to add: This post mostly came about as I needed to take a break from gathering Yahoo!Groups data. The directory currently is not working for me. It limits my ability to data gather as a result. Two of the big things in terms of moving a team up or down the above list are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has a lot of voids and that’s easy enough to fill in. I did that. Things at the bottom didn’t change much but things at the top really did change with four clubs above the 40,000 fans threshold.
Given the huge leaps there, I cannot really foresee the top order changing much, especially as the Twitter data is already there. The other social networks out there just do not have populations to provide an audience that size. Facebook claims that 7,680,420 people are from Australia on its service. When 50,000 list their interest as the Magpies or the Blues, well, that’s .6% of all Australians on Facebook. Or put another way, 3 out of every 500 Australians on the site list one of those two teams as an interest. For a sports team, that seems really high and about on par for the most popular sports team in other countries. (The New York Yankees have about 785,000 fans for an American population of about 101,468,000 on Facebook. That puts the percentage at about .7%.)
Yahoo!Groups doesn’t have a large population. While bebo is popular in Australia, it doesn’t provide numbers even close to this. The only way to get numbers that large are to find community specific sites which require registration.
More edited to add: One of the things I did not realize with the various data sets I’ve been compiling is that about a third of the teams in the National Rugby League aren’t included. My bad. Most of my focus has been on the AFL. Hence, the oversight. I’ve compiled that again and rather than update with a third image, just going to say that there have been no major shake ups. The Brisbane Broncos remain on thop. The St. George Dragons are at the bottom with 240 fans. Second to last are the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs with 1,580. No team really has the big number of fans that the AFL has.
More editing: I normally tried variations of a team’s name for Facebook to make sure I get the highest number. In the case of St. George Illawarra Dragons, I goofed and got the one that listed 240. When I used St Geoergillawarra Dragons combed with St. George Illawarra Dragons, I got 9,200. This change will show up in any future data analysis. The collection date has always been changed to today just so I know when I got that number.
There is a directory for Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the Australian Football League. There are 276 lists found in it. There are an additional 195 listed in the Clubs and Team subcategory. And then there are the following counts for team specific subcategories:
It is possible to get data from some of these lists if you either join them or member data is public. (scrapheap_afl for instance has 25 members and hasn’t been updated since August 2009. Eight people list their ages with an average age of 38. Eight people list their country. Two are from Australia, two are from the United Kingdom and four are from the United States. Nine people list their gender and all are male.) For mailing lists that require joining to get the information, most of them have open membership. Spammers than join and post unrelated, offtopic spam. This spam problem thus makes the data very suspect. The number of communities is also suspect because there are several instances of incorrect categorization. For instance, there is an Indian department soccer team grouped in the Western Bulldogs category.
If we were looking for a reason to use this data, it might be best used for historical purposes: When were these communities created and when were they most active? When did they go inactive? This data would have to be currated manually as the suspect groups would need to be removed and periods of high spam posts would need to identified. Hopefully, in the next day or so, I can provide some data that has the creation dates of Yahoo!Groups to help begin to analyze these patterns.
I looked at the most popular teams on Facebook for the AFL. Now it is time for the NRL. The following is based on the official Facebook pages that are linked on a team’s official site. If a team is not listed, it is because they did not provide a link to their official Facebook page or provided a bad link. This data was gathered on April 6, 2010.
What’s the most popular AFL team on Facebook? That really does depend on how you measure it.
The following table has a column for total people listing a team as an interest, total number of members of the largest fan page dedicated to a team, total number of fans of the largest page dedicated to a team and the grand total. This information was collected in the past three days.
| Team | Interest | Page | Group | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collingwood Magpies | 59800 | 80 | 7969 | 67849 |
| West Coast Eagles | 26020 | 33501 | 5094 | 64615 |
| Carlton Blues | 58120 | 317 | 1626 | 60063 |
| Adelaide Crows | 50020 | 1579 | 5827 | 57426 |
| Fremantle Dockers | 43660 | 96 | 3625 | 47381 |
| Sydney Swans | 21260 | 18094 | 4737 | 44091 |
| Hawthorn Hawks | 21220 | 2602 | 6595 | 30417 |
| Essendon Bombers | 27920 | 248 | 1989 | 30157 |
| Richmond Tigers | 13960 | 11727 | 2782 | 28469 |
| Geelong Cats | 15760 | 5092 | 3976 | 24828 |
| Brisbane Lions | 10940 | 10556 | 2302 | 23798 |
| St. Kilda Saints | 15480 | 317 | 4281 | 20078 |
| Port Adelaide Power | 6100 | 9766 | 3157 | 19023 |
| North Melbourne Kangaroos | 9120 | 4314 | 2420 | 15854 |
| Western Bulldogs | 2740 | 4745 | 7295 | 14780 |
| Melbourne Demons | 5940 | 4057 | 4003 | 14000 |
| Gold Coast Football Club | 1200 | 1720 | 66 | 2986 |
And then I completed this and realized the biggest fan pages I had? They weren’t the official ones. Time to get the official ones, where the total fans are much bigger, and then update.
Green: Indicates official Facebook fanpage has the most fans.
Blue: Indicates a page not linked on the official page has the most fans.
Red: Indicates an official Facebook fanpage was not found to be linked to on the Club’s official site.
Black: AFL does not link to an official page for the team.
Fixed. As an American, I’m used to professional team names being City Mascot. When I search, this tends to be my default mode of searching. It can screw up results and I have to remember to search all variations to make sure this doesn’t happen. When I was just looking for biggest, I didn’t. Woe. But anyway, these results should hopefully be a bit more accurate. I went to every team’s official site that was linked on the AFL’s site. On the official site, I looked for their official Facebook fanpage accounts. Then I took that information and added it to the above table to get a more accurate picture. If an unofficial fanpage had more fans than the official one? I left the unofficial one. I’ve color coded that chart to make easy to see where I did that.
Yesterday, I made a post about the most popular Australian athlete, league and team related Twitter accounts.
On Twitter, @anthonyalsop pointed me to a list of Australian athletes on Twitter he had created. I had missed quite a few on his list and some of those accounts led me to lists where I found additional athletes, teams and leagues. All told, I added about 61 new rows of data. There are a few repeats from yesterday’s list as I updated some numbers. (Historical twitter growth for athletes would be interesting to look at and there are tools for just that. It is a project for a different day. Maybe.) There doesn’t appear to be much change.
Things to remember with this list: It does not include athletes who do not play for team based sports. Swimmers, golfers, tennis players, surfers and race car drivers are not on the list. It also does not include Australian athletes playing for teams outside of Australia. This includes cyclists (who are probably the most popular Australian athletes that I can find) as they often compete for teams outside Australia. It does not include Australian NBA and WNBA players. It also does not include retired Australian athletes, unless they are now involved in a management role with a specific team. National teams are included but players are generally sorted by their other playing affiliation. This list does include athletes and teams from outside Australia when the league has teams from other countries. Thus, South Africa is represented with its Super 14 teams and New Zealand is included with a variety of teams in leagues such as the NRL, Super 14 and the NBL.
Updated this list on the 11th to include the Australian Opals thanks to a comment by @SportingSheilas.
An updated version of this list can be found at Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
This is sorted by total number of followers. If an account is tagged (unofficial), it indicates that it is not the official account; it belongs to management, a player or a fansite. The list includes teams from most of the major sports leagues in Australia. Teams that play in those leagues that are not from Australia have also been included. Players were only counted as belonging to a team if they currently play for it. (Some players that are on NRL player lists have gone to play in Europe. They aren’t included.) The date that the information was collected is also included as these numbers actively change over time. If some one/team/organization is listed twice, it is because the data was collected on multiple dates.
This post looks at the geographic distribution of various fans by location inside Australia. The maps were created using Google’s Fusion Tables. The data is based on this table, which includes bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones. The totals by city were added together. (So if there were 2 bebo fans and 1 blogger fan from a city, the total will be 3.) (United Kingdom and United States data has been filtered out.) These tables will not likely be updated. Rather, this data will probably appear in a new table and graphs when more data is added. Please read the Google created legend carefully.
Adelaide Crows
Brisbane Lions
Geelong Cats
Port Adelaide Power
Adelaide United
Sydney FC
Brisbane Bullets
Brisbane Broncos
Canberra Raiders
Canterbury Crusaders
There are only two fans of the team on bebo, so this almost doesn’t deserve a post of its own. Nonetheless, it gets one. The Fitzroy Lions were one of the original teams in the Victoria Football League. In 1996, they merged with the Brisbane Bears to become the Brisbane Lions. Through a series of events, the Fitzroy Football Club replaced their mascot, the Lion, merged with the University Reds and became known as the Fitzroy Reds and now play in the Victorian Amateur Football Association. That history explains why the Fitzroy Lions have a message board dedicated to them on Yahoo!Groups that dates back 2000. Of the two fans on bebo, only one lists profile information: Male, 45 and from Perth, Western Australia.
As their incarnation as the Fitzroy Reds, they lack fans listing them as an interest on bebo, all LiveJournal clones, blogger. There are no Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the team. The only place where they have a some one listing them as an interest on LiveJournal. That person has not updated in 213 weeks and is from Melbourne.
People appear uninterested in defunct teams or small, amateur teams of which the Fitzroy Lions are both.
I’ve finished tallying the number of fans by team for blogger. The following chart is sorted by most popular teams first, least popular teams last.
| State | League | Interest | Blogger | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales | AFL | Sydney Swans | 34 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Collingwood Magpies | 22 | |
| Western Australia | AFL | West Coast Eagles | 22 | |
| New South Wales | A-League | Sydney FC | 18 | |
| South Australia | AFL | Adelaide Crows | 14 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Brisbane Broncos | 12 | |
| Queensland | AFL | Brisbane Lions | 12 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Geelong Cats | 12 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Western Bulldogs | 12 | |
| Victoria | A-League | Melbourne Victory | 11 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Essendon Bombers | 10 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Wests Tigers | 10 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks | 8 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Parramatta Eels | 8 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Sydney Roosters | 8 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | South Sydney Rabbitohs | 6 | |
| South Australia | A-League | Adelaide United | 5 | |
| Western Australia | AFL | Fremantle Dockers | 5 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Melbourne Demons | 5 | |
| Western Australia | A-League | Perth Glory | 5 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Richmond Tigers | 5 | |
| Australian Capital Territory | NRL | Canberra Raiders | 4 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Carlton Blues | 4 | |
| Victoria | NRL | Melbourne Storm | 4 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Newcastle Knights | 4 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | St. George Illawarra Dragons | 4 | |
| Victoria | AFL | St. Kilda Saints | 4 | |
| Victoria | AFL | Hawthorn Hawks | 3 | |
| Victoria | AFL | North Melbourne Kangaroos | 3 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Penrith Panthers | 3 | |
| New Zealand | A-League | Wellington Phoenix | 3 | |
| Queensland | NBL | Brisbane Bullets | 2 | |
| New Zealand | NRL | Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs | 2 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Gold Coast Titans | 2 | |
| Victoria | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | Melbourne Phoenix | 1 | |
| New Zealand | NRL | New Zealand Warriors | 1 | |
| New South Wales | A-League | Newcastle Jets | 1 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Newtown Jets (defunct) | 1 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | North Sydney Bears (defunct) | 1 | |
| South Australia | AFL | Port Adelaide Power | 1 | |
| Queensland | Brisbane Netball Association | ACE Netball Club | 0 | |
| South Australia | NRL | Adelaide Rams (defunct) | 0 | |
| South Australia | ANZ Championship | Adelaide Thunderbirds | 0 | |
| Australian Capital Territory | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | AIS Canberra Darters | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Annandale Dales (defunct) | 0 | |
| Australia | Netball Australia | Australian Diamonds (national team) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Balmain Tigers (defunct) | 0 | |
| Western Australia | Claxton Shield | Barbagallo Perth Heat | 0 | |
| Queensland | A-League | Brisbane Roar | 0 | |
| New Zealand | Super 14 | Canterbury Crusaders | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Canterbury Tactix | 0 | |
| New South Wales | A-League | Central Coast Mariners Football Club | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Central Pulse | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Cumberland (defunct) | 0 | |
| Victoria | Victorian Amateur Football Association | Fitzroy Lions | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Glebe Dirty Reds (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Gold Coast Chargers (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | AFL | Gold Coast Football Club | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Gold Coast Giants (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | Gold Coast Seagulls (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | A-League | Gold Coast United | 0 | |
| New South Wales | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | Hunter Jaegers | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Hunter Mariners (defunct) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Illawarra Steelers (defunct) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles | 0 | |
| Victoria | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | Melbourne Kestrels | 0 | |
| Victoria | ANZ Championship | Melbourne Vixens | 0 | |
| New South Wales | ANZ Championship | New South Wales Swifts (Sydney Swifts) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Newcastle Rebels (defunct) | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | North Queensland Cowboys | 0 | |
| Queensland | A-League | North Queensland Fury FC | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Northern Eagles (defunct) | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Northern Mystics | 0 | |
| Victoria | Plenty Valley Netball Association | Orcas Netball | 0 | |
| Western Australia | Commonwealth Bank Trophy | Perth Orioles | 0 | |
| Western Australia | NRL | Perth Reds (defunct) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | Netball New South Wales | Petersham RUFC Netball Club | 0 | |
| Queensland | AHL | Queensland Blades | 0 | |
| Queensland | KFC Twenty20 Big Bash | Queensland Bulls | 0 | |
| Queensland | ANZ Championship | Queensland Firebirds | 0 | |
| Queensland | Rugby League/State of Origin | Queensland Maroons | 0 | |
| Queensland | Claxton Shield | Queensland Rams | 0 | |
| Queensland | Super 14 | Queensland Reds | 0 | |
| Queensland | Gridiron Australia Nationals | Queensland Sundevils | 0 | |
| Queensland | NRL | South Queensland Crushers (defunct) | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Southern Steel | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | St. George Dragons (defunct) | 0 | |
| New Zealand | ANZ Championship | Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic | 0 | |
| Western Australia | ANZ Championship | West Coast Fever | 0 | |
| Western Australia | NRL | Western Reds (defunct) | 0 | |
| New South Wales | NRL | Western Suburbs Magpies (defunct) | 0 |
What I didn’t find all that surprising was the dominance of AFL teams at the top. They have eight of the twelve spots for teams with double digit fans on their service. Of the remaining four spots, two are for the A-League and two are for the NRL. The presence of the A-League feels a bit surprising as I didn’t think that soccer was that popular in Australia, at least compared to the NRL. I do recall a fair amount of advertising for the A-League and they are beginning to build more soccer purpose built stadiums in Australia.
For the 28 teams with 1 to 9 fans, all are from the NRL, AFL or A-League with the exception of the Melbourne Phoenix who played in the Commonwealth Bank Trophy. I am a bit surprised that some of the more popular netball teams on Facebook, Twitter and bebo didn’t make the list for blogger. I’m not surprised that other leagues didn’t make the list as most of these leagues are for secondary sports.
There are 227 total listings for people who list a team as an interest. (There may be duplicates, where a person lists more than one team as an interest.) Of the population, 144 or 63% identify themselves as male, 63 or 28% identify themselves as female and 20 or 9% do not identify a gender. This feels in line with how sports fandom tends to be depicted when looked at by gender: Male dominant but with a growing female demographic.
Of the 227, only 154 listed their birthdate and had their astrological sign displayed. The distribution amongst various astrological signs is pretty even with the smallest representation at 7 or 5% for Taurus and the largest at 17 or 11% for Pisces. The distribution for specific teams is much less even, but much of this can be attributed to the small sample size.
142 of he 227 list their age when problematic ages, like 253, are removed. The oldest fans are those for the Richmond Tigers, who average 41.6 years. This community is small though, with only three people listing their age. The Parramatta Eels have the oldest average age for a team with five or more people who list their age. Their average age is 35.8. The NRL and AFL are evenly distributed for teams with the oldest fans. Penrith Panthers has the youngest average fan age at 18, but the population size is only one. For a team with five or more people listing them as an interest, the Melbourne Victory win with an average age of 22.8.
167 fans list an Australian state of residence. (There may be more Australian in this sample but they don’t necessarily list their state.) The most popular state for sports fans on blogger listing an Australian team as an interest in New South Wales, with 62 people. Victoria is second with 43. Queensland is third with 28. Western Australia is fourth with 15. South Australia is fifth with 11. The ACT has 5, Tasmania has 2 and the Northern Territory has 1. In the ACT, the most popular team is the Brisbane Lions with 2 fans. In New South Wales, Syndey FC is the most popular team with 16 fans. The Roosters are the second most popular with 7 fans, which is a pretty big difference between the most popular and second most popular teams. The Collingwood Magpies are the most popular team in the Northern Territory with 1 fan. The Brisbane Lions are the most popular team in Queensland with 7 fans. The Broncos are the second most popular with 4 fans. The Adelaide Crows are the most popular team in South Australia with 8 fans. The only other team listed as an interest by people listing the state as their place of residence were Adelaide United of the A-League. No NRL team interested people from that state. From Tasmania, 1 person listed the Geelong Cats as an interest and 1 person listed the Richmond Tigers as an interest. In Victoria, the Collingwood Magpies were the most popular team with 12 people listing them as an interest. The second most popular team with 7 fans was Melbourne Victory. In Western Australia, there are two most popular teams: Fremantle Dockers and Perth Glory with 5 fans each. There is no second most popular team. The other five people from the state evenly distribute their interest with one fan for five teams. I don’t feel well enough informed at this point to know if this reflects on existing regional sports fandom patterns.
Based on the somewhat data I have so far from Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and its clones, blogger and bebo, the Melbourne Victory are one of the most popular teams in Australia. They are only behind Collingwood Magpies, Carlton Blues, and the Queensland Maroons. A lot of this is attributed to the 46,620 people who list the team as an interest on Facebook and 1,432 people following the team on Twitter.
So far, only 28 teams have been looked at on blogger and here, the Victory fall in the middle of the pack with only 11 people listing them as an interest. Most of the sampling on the network has involved the AFL and Queensland based teams. Teams ahead of the Victory include Sydney Swans, Collingwood Magpies, West Coast Eagles, Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Lions, Geelong Cats, and the Western Bulldogs.
What does this small community look like? Of the eleven, nine list their country of residence. Of these nine, eight are Australians and one is likely an Australian who is currently traveling the United States. Of the nine Australians, seven list their state of origin and they are all from Victoria, six listing Melbourne as their home and one listing St. Kilda as theirs. This is a team that draws, at least on blogger, from where it is based and does not have a larger, national following.
Seven people list their age. For mean, median and mode, age is the same: 22. This is a relatively young fan community, especially when compared to a few of the AFL team communities on blogger. The community is also a more likely to be male with 6 people identifying as male, 3 identifying as female and 2 not identifying. Between the Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Bullets, Brisbane Lions, Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies, Essendon Bombers, Fremantle Dockers, Geelong Cats, Hawthorn Hawks, Melbourne Demons, and North Melbourne Kangaroos communities, only the Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies and Geelong Cats communities have a smaller female fanbase.
It will be interesting to see how this community eventually compares to other A-League teams on the network.
The following chart is based on the data gathered for posts to date. It is intended to give a general idea as to the comparative size of various sports fandom communities to each other. Blanks indicate that no data regarding that team on the service has been gathered; it does not indicate a size of zero for that particularly service. If you would like specific data regarding a team on a service to understand where that number of coming from, please comment or e-mail me at laura[at]fanhistory[dot]com. I am more than happy to explain it.
Leagues with teams at the bottom include AFL, AHL, A-League, Claxton Shield, Gridiron Australia Nationals, KFC Twenty20 Big Bash, NBL, Rugby League/State of Origin, Victorian Amateur Football Association. The AFL’s expansion team puts one of their teams in the bottom 10. Soccer teams, baseball teams, American/Gridiron football, basketball, netball, rugby union, ice hockey, rugby league and Australian rules football are at the bottom. Some of these sports can be accounted for because of they are not popular sports in the country. Others can be accounted for because the teams are part of secondary leagues and competitions. It will be interesting to see how and if popularity shifts as more data is added from additional networks.
Edited to add: This post mostly came about as I needed to take a break from gathering Yahoo!Groups data. The directory currently is not working for me. It limits my ability to data gather as a result. Two of the big things in terms of moving a team up or down the above list are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has a lot of voids and that’s easy enough to fill in. I did that. Things at the bottom didn’t change much but things at the top really did change with four clubs above the 40,000 fans threshold.
Given the huge leaps there, I cannot really foresee the top order changing much, especially as the Twitter data is already there. The other social networks out there just do not have populations to provide an audience that size. Facebook claims that 7,680,420 people are from Australia on its service. When 50,000 list their interest as the Magpies or the Blues, well, that’s .6% of all Australians on Facebook. Or put another way, 3 out of every 500 Australians on the site list one of those two teams as an interest. For a sports team, that seems really high and about on par for the most popular sports team in other countries. (The New York Yankees have about 785,000 fans for an American population of about 101,468,000 on Facebook. That puts the percentage at about .7%.)
Yahoo!Groups doesn’t have a large population. While bebo is popular in Australia, it doesn’t provide numbers even close to this. The only way to get numbers that large are to find community specific sites which require registration.
More edited to add: One of the things I did not realize with the various data sets I’ve been compiling is that about a third of the teams in the National Rugby League aren’t included. My bad. Most of my focus has been on the AFL. Hence, the oversight. I’ve compiled that again and rather than update with a third image, just going to say that there have been no major shake ups. The Brisbane Broncos remain on thop. The St. George Dragons are at the bottom with 240 fans. Second to last are the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs with 1,580. No team really has the big number of fans that the AFL has.
More editing: I normally tried variations of a team’s name for Facebook to make sure I get the highest number. In the case of St. George Illawarra Dragons, I goofed and got the one that listed 240. When I used St Geoergillawarra Dragons combed with St. George Illawarra Dragons, I got 9,200. This change will show up in any future data analysis. The collection date has always been changed to today just so I know when I got that number.
There is a directory for Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the Australian Football League. There are 276 lists found in it. There are an additional 195 listed in the Clubs and Team subcategory. And then there are the following counts for team specific subcategories:
It is possible to get data from some of these lists if you either join them or member data is public. (scrapheap_afl for instance has 25 members and hasn’t been updated since August 2009. Eight people list their ages with an average age of 38. Eight people list their country. Two are from Australia, two are from the United Kingdom and four are from the United States. Nine people list their gender and all are male.) For mailing lists that require joining to get the information, most of them have open membership. Spammers than join and post unrelated, offtopic spam. This spam problem thus makes the data very suspect. The number of communities is also suspect because there are several instances of incorrect categorization. For instance, there is an Indian department soccer team grouped in the Western Bulldogs category.
If we were looking for a reason to use this data, it might be best used for historical purposes: When were these communities created and when were they most active? When did they go inactive? This data would have to be currated manually as the suspect groups would need to be removed and periods of high spam posts would need to identified. Hopefully, in the next day or so, I can provide some data that has the creation dates of Yahoo!Groups to help begin to analyze these patterns.
