Ozzie Sport

I haven’t done an update in a month or so… but this is my list of Australian clubs, leagues and athletes on Twitter.  It is sorted by followers.  The list is rather comprehensive but not all comprehensive.  A few accounts have been deleted since the last time I did this.  Those accounts aren’t noted this time around. And unlike the last time around, I haven’t htmled the Twitter accounts.  If you see any people or clubs or fansites that I’m missing, let me know in the comments.

Related Posts:

• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers
• Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs

I’ve been some what lax with collecting data during the past month.  This morning, I decided to remedy this a bit by updating my Alexa rank list for Australian sport clubs and teams.  This is what can be found below.  (The list isn’t all comprehensive.  I tend to mostly focus on the AFL and NRL.) It is interesting to see who is doing well, especially when compared to other clubs in the same league or clubs playing in the same geographic area.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Popular sport team and league sites in Australia
• Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers

I have only been keeping track of foursquare checkins since late April. I get the data between 9pm the day of and 9am the day after. One of the venues I’ve been getting data for has been ANZ Stadium in Homebush. I was curious as to how the State of Origin would rank compared to two of the home games played by the Bulldogs. The following chart shows that:

It looks like the State of Origin game attracted a different audience than Bulldogs and the Rabbitohs. Also worth noting,

there is a valid negative number in that set. It suggests that people are do delete their checkins. I can’t speculate why as I don’t know who deleted their checkin. I can just tell some one did. That suggests that the reliability of this data is similar to anything on the Internet: People delete and add content. The number you get may not be a total addition but rather the total after deletion and additions.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• The NRL on Foursquare

The New South Wales Blues are first class cricket team based at the Sydney Cricket Grounds.  According to Wikipedia, they compete in most of the major cricket tournaments in the country.  There is a small community interested in the team on LiveJournal and its clones with 17 people list the NSW Blues as an interest and 2 on JournalFen.  This isn’t particularly big for LiveJournal, 101 people list the Sydney Swans as an interest and 100 people list the West Coast Eagles as an interest in comparison.  The teams sits between the Carlton Blues at 18 and the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks at 16.

Of the two people on JournalFen, only one lists their year of birth: 1975.  Of the 17 on LiveJournal, ten list their year of birth.  On LiveJournal, the mean year of birth is 1986.4, median is 1987.5 and mode of 1992.  This is pretty close to the Sydney based Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs community on LiveJournal where mean is 1985 and median is 1987.  No other Sydney based teams where I have this data for other networks are as close to the team age wise.

Most fans are Australian with both JournalFen people listing the country as their place of residence and 14 of the 17 on LiveJournal being from Australia.  Of the other three, one does not list a country, one is from Canada and one is from New Zealand.   Of the Australians on JournalFen, one is from New South Wales and one is from the ACT.  On LiveJournal, 2 are from the ACT, 8 are from New South Wales and 2 are from Victoria.  All but one of the people from New South Wales list themselves as being from Sydney; the one who doesn’t is from Gosford, which isn’t that far from Sydney.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers

New Zealand has several professional sports teams that compete in Australian and New Zealand based leagues.  The leagues that are involved with include the the A-League, ANZ Championship,  National Rugby League, and Super 14. The teams include Wellington Phoenix,    Northern Mystics,     Southern Steel,     Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic,    Canterbury Crusaders, and  New Zealand Warriors.  The map below only includes bebo and blogger users who list the team as an interest and list a city in New Zealand as their place of residence.  (I haven’t done LiveJournal and there were no fans on LiveJournal’s clones.)  The city communities involved are really small compared to some of their Australian peers.   Brisbane has 121 compared to Auckland’s 11.  To be fair though, Auckland had fans of Australian based teams and if those were included, they’d be at 22 instead of 11.  (Those 11 fans are all NRL fans of the following teams: Brisbane Broncos, Canberra Raiders, Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, Gold Coast Titans.

New Zealand 18 4 1 Wellington Phoenix Northern Mystics Southern Steel Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic Canterbury Crusaders New Zealand Warriors

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers

This post looks at the size of the Wests Tigers community on blogger.  The Wests Tigers are a Sydney based National Rugby League team.  The team is relatively new, having been founded in 2000 as a merger of the Balmain Tigers and the Western Suburbs Magpies.

So far, the only other NRL team on blogger that has been looked at is the Brisbane Broncos.  That team has 12 people who listed them as an interest.  In comparison, the Wests Tigers have ten people who list them as an interest.  That they are so close is a bit surprising as Roy Morgan Research indicates that the fanbase for the Wests Tigers is substantially smaller than that of the Broncos.

Of the ten West Tigers fans, seven are from Australia, one from New Zealand, one from the United Kingdom and one who does not identify their country of origin.  Compared to other NRL teams, the percentage of Australians is low: 100% of Brisbane Broncos fans on blogger and Dreamwidth are all Australian, 100% of Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal are Australians, 85.7% of Canterbury Bulldogs fans on LiveJournal are Australian, 81.1% of Broncos fans on LiveJournal are Australian.  Of the networks and teams sampled, only the Broncos community on bebo has a smaller percentage, 71.1%, of Australians.

Of the Australians, three are from Queensland and three are from New South Wales.  This makes as these states are strong holds of Rugby League.  Added to that, Melbourne and Sydney have traditionally had a rivalry so you wouldn’t necessary expect a Victorian fan population.

The astrological sign data is really interesting and would be more interesting if it the samples were larger to see if some sort of statement could be made about a team’s fanbase.  That said, six people list their date of birth for Blogger to calculate their astrological sign.  Three are Leos, and with one person being a Cancer, Capricorn and Pisces.

Seven of the ten fans list their age, with two of these being obviously incorrect; a person cannot be 253 years old.   If those two are ignored, the average age of a Wests Tigers fan on blogger is 28.8 and a median age of 22.  This average makes the team’s fans older than some of the other NRL team fans on networks that I’ve looked at including Broncos fans on bebo and LiveJournal,  Canterbury Bulldogs fans on LiveJournal and Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal.  The only team and network with a higher average is the Broncos community on blogger.  The above average age compared to other fan populations may end up being a result of people self selecting networks based on age: the youngest fans prefer bebo, fans in their mid 20s prefer LiveJournal and older fans prefer blogging.  As we age or as a result of a generational gap, we might prefer going from shorter method of communicating to a longer one.

Seven people list their gender as male, two as female and one does not identify their gender.  This is higher percentage of male fans than  the Broncos on either bebo or blogger.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy

I should probably stick to patterns with these posts, completing all the NRL or AFL teams for a network before switching another network, league or team.  I’m just not capable of doing that at the moment.  If you want to keep up with what I am doing data wise with specific leagues, teams and networks, I suggest you use the categories to find posts.  Category navigation can be found on the menu bar.  When you use your mouse to hover over a category, a menu should drop down with more options.

That out of the way, this post will look at the size of the Canterbury Bulldogs fan community on LiveJournal.   The Bulldogs are part of the National Rugby League and are based in Sydney.  (On LiveJournal clones like blurty, Dreamwidth Studios, InsaneJournal and JournalFen, no one lists Canterbury Bulldogs or Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs as an interest.  Therefor, it is impossible to talk about them.)  As of January 11, 2010, twenty-six people list the Canterbury Bulldogs as an interest.

Four of the twenty-six have updated in the last month.  Another five have updated in the last year.   One has never updated.  This lack of recent updating is a bit higher than the percentage wise than the Melbourne Storm community.

Twelve of the twenty-six list their year of birth.   The average year of birth is 1985, and the median and mode year of birth is 1987.  This puts their fanbase on LiveJournal at an average age of about a year younger than their counterpart fans who like the Melbourne Storm.

Twenty-one people list their country of residence.  Eighteen are from Australia, with one each from Jamaica, New Zealand and the United States.  85.7% are Australian.  The percentage of Australians is higher than Brisbance Broncos fans on bebo (71.1% Aussie), Brisbane Bronco fans on LiveJournal (81.1%), Brisbane Broncos fans on Twitter (67.6%).  It is lower than Brisbane Broncos fans on blogger (100%) and Dreamwidth (100%) and Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal (100%).

Of the eighteen Australians, sixteen of them list their state of residence: Fourteen from New South Wales, one from Queensland and one from Victoria.  When compared to the Brisbane Broncos, Balmain Tigers, Cronulla Sharks, Melbourne Storm, North Sydney Bears, and St. George Dragons fans on LiveJournal, this team draws most heavily from New South Wales.   The second most popular team in New South Wales on LiveJournal based on the aforementioned teams is the Melbourne Storm, with seven people from the state.

Related Posts:

• Melbourne Storm on LiveJournal and its clones
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs

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.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers
• Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers