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.
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.
