Ozzie Sport

Australia lost its World Cup bid to Qatar. As an American going to university in Australia, I am sad on a number of fronts. That said, on my Twitter stream, there appear to be a number of people who are a bit sad but they want to get back to the business of football, the football that Australia that Australia does best.

Still, I want to investigate that Australia claim a bit. The only large scale information that I have that could be useful (I don’t exactly want to use LiveJournal or bebo to be representative of Australia. The communities there are just too small.) involves Twitter. The methodology I used is described a bit in Australia Sport Census: Most popular leagues in Melbourne on Twitter.

There are a couple of possible issues with the A-League and my Twitter data. The first is that I’m not as actively looking for Australian A-League accounts as I could be. My organic finding tends to be hung up a bit on AFL accounts as that’s where most of the people I follow come from. When I go hunting for new accounts, I tend to go looking for women’s accounts. I’d like to believe that the A-League is underrepresented. If that’s the case, the numbers by cities could be a bit off.

In Melbourne, the A-League ranks as 8th most popular and the World Cup Australian related accounts rank 11th. In Sydney, the World Cup for soccer ranks 12th and the A-League ranks 13th. In Brisbane, the A-League ranks 11th and the World Cup ranks 14th. In Adelaide, the A-League ranks 10th and the World Cup ranks 15th. In Canberra, the World Cup ranks 12th and the A-League ranks 17th. In Newcastle, the A-League ranks 5th. In Townsville, the A-League ranks 4th. In Gosford, the A-League ranks second. In Essendon, the A-League ranks 7th. This isn’t a bad position to be in. Often, three of the places above those involve cricket, where Shane Warne counts for Cricket Victoria, Michael Smith counts for Cricket New South Wales and ESPN’s Cricket site counts for Cricket Australia. That distribution pushes those numbers down a lot. The rankings also include things like the Rugby World Cup and Swimming Australia. It also counts Andrew Bogut for Basketball Australia. (He’s Australian and he plays for the Boomers.)

All things considered, the space that the A-League occupies isn’t a bad place to be. The league and the national teams have clearly established itself on Twitter, having found a significant soccer fanbase inside the country. It certainly is better placed than the NBL and ANZ Championship. In many cities, the A-League does better than the Super League. The A-League is also much better placed than second tier sports like the ABL and AIHL. It often does better against other popular sports like surfing, cycling and hockey.

That out of the way, what are the most popular cities for soccer? I don’t have comparative rankings for cities. (I suppose I should be able to get that at some point.) I can give the total number of followers by city and that’s what can be found in the table below.

Related Posts:

• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia
• New Zealand Sport Census: League popularity on Twitter: Wellington vs. Auckland
• Australia Sport Census: Most popular leagues in Melbourne on Twitter
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)