Ozzie Sport

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.

Related Posts:

• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

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.

Related Posts:

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

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:

• Data dump: Australian sport 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)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)

The New South Wales Swifts were originally the Sydney Swifts and part of the Commonwealth Bank Trophy.  When the event change and became the ANZ Championship and became more of a state versus state netball competition, the team’s name change.  The team names are used interchangably here depending on the original usage.

The team has been discussed in an earlier post about the size of the ANZ Championship community on Twitter.  This post will look into the specific community dedicated to the New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups.

There is one group dedicated to the Sydney Swifts on Yahoo!Groups.  It was created on May 16, 2001 and currently has 50 members.  The group has been neglected and been the subject of spam starting in 2005.  Prior to that, discussion on the list had ended in March 2002 (with the admin having deleted three spam e-mails in November 2003).  There were 84 legitimate posts to the list in this period.  Graphing it, the posting volume looks like:

This posting pattern is similar to that of the some of the less active AFL teams on Yahoo!Groups.  I joined the list to find out membership demographic information.  Only eleven of the current members joined when there was active posting to the list.  Ten people joined in the period with no posting, and the other 29 joined during periods of active spamming.   Of the 50, only four listed their demographic information.  When the list was active, the person who listed their age has 21, female and Australian.  After the period of active spam, the three people listing demographic information were all male and older.  Of the two who listed their country of residence, neither listed Australia.    (For the totals on Yahoo!Groups on my chart, this will listed at 50, despite the the fact that  only 21 or so are probably legitimately interested in the team.  At the moment, I do not have the time and ability to join every team related mailing list to determine who is and is not a legitimate poster based on join date.)

On LiveJournal, there are two people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest.  Of the two, one updated a week ago, is 22 and from New South Wales.  The other has not updated in 162 weeks and does not list a country of residence.

There are four people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest on bebo and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest.  Only one lists their age, 20.  The other three list their location and all are based i New South Wales.

The community on Twitter is the largest, with 90 people following the official team account.  Facebook, surprisingly, has no one listing the team as an interest.  Yahoo!Groups probably legitimately had the second largest following with 21 if we only count back in the day.  The fact that bebo and LiveJournal both have bigger interest than Facebook is also surprising.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location

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

This post is part of a series looking at the AFL fandom on Yahoo!Groups.  It focuses on providing general historical information about these groups: When they were founded and activity levels.  For a critique of the problems on Yahoo!Groups in getting demographic information, read Sydney Swans on Yahoo!Groups and The AFL on Yahoo!Groups.

This post is about the Yahoo!Group’s Freemantle Dockers community.The Fremantle Dockers directory on Yahoo!Groups has five mailing lists.  Of these, four are actually about the AFL team and one is generally dedicated to the AFL.  The four lists are docker_1995, fremantledockersinternetclub, Fremantle_Dockers, and grazzasfremantledockersclub. The first was created in February 2008 and as three members.  There has been no legitimate content posted to it.  The second two were both founded in 2000. fremantledockersinternetclub has 17 members and legitimate content appears to have ended after May 2006. Fremantle_Dockers has 66 members.  Legitimate content ended after January 2005. grazzasfremantledockersclub was founded in December 1999 and has 23 members.  Legitimate content ended after April 2002.

I  added real posting from the lists together and created the following chart:

This community just is not as active as the Sydney Swans or Western Bulldogs.  The peak for the Bulldogs was at about 24 and the peak for the Swans was 49.  What is interesting is that the peaks differ, with a 2003 peak for the Dockers compared to a 2001 and 2008 peak for the Bulldogs and a 2005 and 2006 peak for the Swans. According to Wikipedia, 2003 was a great year for the Dockers as they finished 5th and made it to the finals.  While they finished 3rd and made it to the finals in 2006, there was no similar bump.  For this team, there have to be other factors at play to explain the overall low posting volume and the total posting drop off since late 2006.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• The AFL on Yahoo!Groups
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

As mentioned in my previous post, Yahoo!Groups has a spam problem.  Open membership groups get a lot of spammers joining.  Capatchas do not seem to stop spammers from joining.  Absentee owners, often from groups founded five to ten years ago, mean that these spammers are free to spam with out any consequences.   Public archives are a great incentive for spammers to do this as others archive those posts and provide additional links for them.  Yahoo!Groups is thus a bit more problematic, demographic information wise, than blogger (where spammers don’t fill in that info), bebo, LiveJournal and Facebook.  It just doesn’t feel worthwhile to make the effort to get it.

That said, I still want to look at Yahoo!Groups and their history in Australia’s sports fandom.  The first team I am looking at is the Sydney Swans.  There are fourteen groups listed in Yahoo!Groups Sydney Swans category.  Of these, six are actually dedicated to the Sydney Swans.  These are rainbow_swans, sydneyswansfc, redandwhiteonline, sydneyswanscentral, judeboltonandthesydneyswans, and swanniesfansunited.

All the Sydney Swans mailing lists were created in a window between October 1998 and October 2003, with one created in both those months and the other four created in 2001.  (In 2000, Yahoo!Groups acquired egroups and by 2001, they had migrated those mailing lists over.  In 2001, Yahoo!Groups had also lifted the ban on adult mailing lists.  Neither of these events likely explains the 2001 surge in group creation.  Other factors such as general internet connectivity and ease of creation of mailing lists on Yahoo!Groups compared to other tools like majordomo probably do a much better job at explaining this surge.)

All of these mailing lists  are currently pretty dead, with the exception of occasional spam posting.   I looked at each list to determine when spam content started and legitimate posting ended.  The total posting volume for these lists was then gathered and the following chart was created:

Mailing list volume in 2009 was a result of activity that was taking place on rainbow_swans, a mailing list for GLBT fans of the team.  Volume across all lists peaked in September 2005, the month that the team won their last Grand Final.  This activity all took place on rainbow_swans.  The month after their victory, volume dropped from 49 to 10 but there was activity on three lists.  The second major peak was in August 2006.  This was a month before the team appeared in the Grand Final, which they lost.  The volume was ten less than the previous year and, again, all took place on one list.  September, when they actually played in the finals, volume was significantly less at 26 total posts.

Overall, activity levels for the team’s fans on Yahoo!Groups tends to correlate with the team’s overall performance and when they are playing games during the season.

Related Posts:

• The AFL on Yahoo!Groups
• 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 sport league/team websites in Australia

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:

• · Adelaide Crows (7)
• · Brisbane Lions (22)
• · Carlton Blues (13)
• · Collingwood Magpies (11)
• · Essendon Bombers (21)
• · Fremantle Dockers (5)
• · Geelong Cats (5)
• · Hawthorn Hawks (17)
• · Melbourne Demons (7)
• · North Melbourne Kangaroos (10)
• · Port Adelaide Power (10)
• · Richmond Tigers (15)
• · St. Kilda Saints (5)
• · Sydney Swans (14)
• · West Coast Eagles (8)
• · Western Bulldogs (10)

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.

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 sport league/team websites in Australia
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)

I’ve not really spent much time looking for fan communities for Australian sports teams on Facebook.  This is for a couple of reasons.  First, the data from Facebook’s Advertising Target Selection is often subject to wild fluctuations in the course of small periods of time.  In the case of one search, there was a 200 person drop in ten minutes on a sample size of about 3,000.  That’s pretty significant and calls into  question all the data.  The second reason is that it is hard to get data out of Facebook’s Advertising Target Selection.  For LiveJournal, bebo and blogger, I might not be able to get all a user’s info but I have enough that I can easily tell you that the average Northern Territory fan of a team is this age.  I can identify specific individuals and in some cases make educated guesses about the reliability of the data.    With Facebook, all I get is a number based on the selection.  If I want to find out how many female fans there of the Brisbane Lions from Queensland, I have to make a number of selections to get that number.  (But I only get that based on city for Facebook, not state.)  If I want to find out how many male fans there are, I have to go back to Facebook and make another series of selections.  I can’t do that with in the context of my own data set compiled / exported from Facebook.  This makes it really impossible to compile a complete listing of data in a timely manner.  If I want to find out how many 18 year olds are fans of the Canberra Raiders, I have to make that selection one at a time.  Aggravating.

Still, I wanted an idea of what is going on with Australia’s sports fandom on Facebook in terms of location and demographics.  What I thus have is a load of random data.  (Random data is random.) I tended to focus on cities and teams, with both chosen mostly at random. I can’t find an easy way to display or map this so the table is located below for you to look at.

Before that, some things I found interesting in this data:

• Brisbane Roar’s male fans are double the amount of their female counter parts.
• Brisbane Roar fans also to be single with 420 married compared to 180 married.
• The Perth Wildcats don’t have a fanbase in the Northern Territory or Tasmania.
• Queensland Maroons have 40 fans in Rockhampton, Queensland compared to the 8,100 fans they have in Sydney.
• New Zealand’s Canterbury Crusaders have the same fan community size, 80, in Sydney as the do in Cranbourne.
• The Melbourne Vixens are the only netball team to be listed as an interest from the Tasman ANZ Championship teams.
• St. Kilda is more popular than the Sydney Swans in Adelaide.
• Essendon Bombers are more likely to be college graduates than currently in high school.  At least for those on Facebook.
• In the AFL, the Essendon Bombers are more popular than the Geelong Cats, Hawthorn Hawks, North Melbourne Kangaroos, Richmond Tigers, St. Kilda Saints, and Sydney Swans for all Australians on Facebook.
• The Adelaide Crows are more popular in Brisbane than in Perth.
• Between the Perth Wildcats, Parramatta Eels, St. Kilda Football Club, Penrith Panthers, South Sydney Rabbitohs , Sydney Swans, and Wests Tigers, the mot popular teams in Hobart is St. Kilda with the Sydney Swans coming in second and the Parramatta Eels coming in third.
• Darwin only has 4,360  people from the city on Facebook.  Between, Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks, Gold Coast Titans, Geelong Cats, Perth Wildcats, Hawthorn Hawks, Newcastle Knights, Parramatta Eels, St. Kilda Football Club,South Sydney Rabbitohs, and Wests Tigers, no teams has more than 20 fans in the city and the 50 mile area around it.
• In Perth, the Perth Wildcats are more popular than the Perth Glory.

Edited to add on January 9, 2010: 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:

• 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 athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (October 11)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (October 4)

This post is a series of posts looking at the size of Australian sports leagues on LiveJournal, its clones and other social networks. Five earlier posts were Australian Football League on JournalFen , Australian Football League community on DeadJournal , National Rugby League on DeadJournal and JournalFen,  Australian Football League on LiveJournal clones like Blurty, Dreamwidth Studios and InsaneJournal and Adelaide Crows community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger.

There is a tool called Twitter Analyzer.  It allows you to get some data about your followers on Twitter.  It has some short comings, namely that it really only allows you to identify followers by country, rather than state.  When trying to figure out the population location inside Australia for a team, this is a bit of a problem.  Still, data is data and I ran every team’s official Twitter account through it and the results are… not what I consider particularly useful.  For me rather than highlight where an audience for a team is, this highlights the problem of Twitter follow spam.

Before going into this, Australian Football League games are available outside Australia.  The AFL has a list of their international partners that air games and news from the league.  The easiest place to get games is the United States and the United Kingdom where ESPN may provide them with up to three matches a week.  Ireland’s national network doesn’t appear to get games, so much as they get match summaries but they do get some on ESPN.  Europe gets the games on Eurosport but they are limited to two matches a week.  The Middle East and North Africa get two live matches a week.  New Zealand gets one live match a week on Sky, with additional coverage during sports related news casts.  Canada gets one game a week.  There is no indication that these games air live in Central and South America, Asia, and Oceania.  Airing of games in Africa is only very recent in a deal that appears to have taken place midway through the 2009 season. There clearly is an international market for the AFL and it is being fed.

In the United States, the major site for info on Australian rules football, Australian Football Association of North America, gets only about 503 visitors a month.  For the official AFL site, Compete estimates the size of the United States visiting population at 6,736 for the past month.  This is relatively small population that we are talking about.  Alexa says that the official AFL site gets 2.6% of its traffic from countries other than Australia, Sri Lanka, the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India.  Alexa does not rank the official site in Ecuador, Germany, Thailand, or France.

With that all in mind, time for Twitter data.  The team with the most followers it the Adelaide Crows with 3,696 follows.  The Essendon Bombers come in second with 3,808 followers.  The Collingwood Magpies are third at 3,506 followers and the Sydney Swans are fourth with 3,160 followers.  At the bottom are the Gold Coast Football Club with 139 followers.  The second smallest team in term of followers count is are the Fremantle Dockers with 282 followers.  Third is the Brisbane Lions with 363 followers.  All the other teams have follow counts above 500 and below 300.  Comparing the totals to the totals for LiveJournal clones, which is admittedly a bit small, something feels a bit out of whack but as I’m not Australian, not exposed to AFL coverage on a regular basis as part of my local news watching and reading, I’m not sure what.  The Essendon Bombers are number one for most followers on Twitter but rank 13th for total fans on LiveJournal clones.  The Collingwood Magpies rank 9th for population total on LJ clones and 3rd for followers on Twitter.  The Carlton Blues rank last for followers on LiveJournal clones but 6th on Twitter.  The Hawthorn Hawks rank 4th on LiveJournal clones and 11th on Twitter.  The Brisbane Lions rank 3rd on LiveJournal clones and 11th on Twitter.  The Fremantle Dockers rank 2nd on LiveJournal clones and 15 on Twitter.

As I implied above, there is an international audience for the AFL but the size of it is some what limited.  Twitter Analyzer’s numbers don’t add up when comparing them to total followers so I’m not sure how accurate they really are. Overall, when total follower counts for all teams are added together, the total is 26,134 followers.  Based on Twitter Analyzer, 15,191 people do not list their country in their profiles.  That leaves us with 10,943 people who do list their country which would be fine but  9,059 are from Australia and 4,669 are from the United States which shouldn’t be possible.  Given that, I’m just going to compare the totals based on the data that Twitter Analyzer provides and ignore the total followers numbers from Twitter.

Using these numbers, 59.6% of all followers of official AFL accounts are Australians.  Americans represent 30.7% of all followers.  Great Britain accounts for 3.3% of all followers.  Germany, Ecuador, and India all have percentages between 1.0 and 1.9%.   In addition to those numbers, 42 accounts from Greenland, 68 from Thailand, 18 from Vietnam and 31 from Argentina follow these official team Twitter accounts.

I’m going to call highjinks here.  I know there is a US audience for the AFL.  We have our own domestic leagues, which attract a small audience mostly of die hard fans and people connected to the players.  The games are televised.  But I cannot believe that the Australian audience for teams on Twitter is only twice that of the US audience.  I’m also having a hard time believe that Ecuador and Argentina have a large following on Twitter.  I don’t believe that these numbers are a reliable indicator of international interest by country in these teams.  Evidence seems to indicate that two of the following are likely taking place: People are not listing the country they are actually from AND that these accounts have people following them with the intention of trying to get an autofollow back.  This data just is not reliable to determine the size of an team’s audience, or even the team’s effectiveness at using Twitter to reach their target audience.

That said, the following is a country by country break down based on the numbers from Twitter Analyzer.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)