Social Clubs : the 100 most popular teams in the world all sports combined

[Marla_Singer]

Over 1 billion

Here is a list of the 100 professional sports teams having the most likes in Facebook and followers on Twitter (cumulated).

Football is leading the way with 49 teams cumulating together 742 million fans. Football clubs represented are pretty diverse as they are coming from 14 countries over 4 continents: Europe, South America, North America and Africa.

Sports from the United States are still well represented with 43 teams representing 4 different sports: basketball, gridiron football, baseball and ice Hockey. Altogether the US teams listed count 248 million fans.

Finally, the cricket Indian Premier League is represented by all of its 8 member teams, totaling together 64 million fans.

Overall, the 100 teams in the list below counts 1,054,949,288 fans on the two major social networks.

See the complete Top100 ranking :
http://www.international-football.net/social-clubs

[SEE MORE]​

 

[ummmm........]

Interesting list . . .

But it's hard for me to see how four basketball teams and a baseball team -- even the Yankees -- show up before the first football team. It would also be interesting to see how college teams rank, but I don't guess there is really a way to measure them by this metric . . .

 

[Marla_Singer]

Interesting list . . .

But it's hard for me to see how four basketball teams and a baseball team -- even the Yankees -- show up before the first football team. It would also be interesting to see how college teams rank, but I don't guess there is really a way to measure them by this metric . . .

Remember that this is a global scale thing. The NBA has probably the most international audience of all the big 4 American leagues. The New York Yankees are very famous throughout the world, maybe more as a brand and a logo than as a team but this probably generates a certain international appeal on Facebook.

As for NCAA teams, there are so many of them that I couldn't check them all, but all those I've tested were really, really far from the 1 million mark I fixed as a minimum to be recorded on my table.

If there are particularly famous NCAA basketball or football teams you want me to check, please do. And if they have more than 2.5 million fans they would be added to the table.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

If there are particularly famous NCAA basketball or football teams you want me to check, please do. And if they have more than 2.5 million fans they would be added to the table.

But your table specifically says "professional sports" at the top!

Oh.

Yeah.

That.

You might check on the University of Southern California.

 

[BirraImperial]

Interesting that the Bulls have so many fans, probably most coming from the Jordan era perhaps??

 

[ummmm........]

If there are particularly famous NCAA basketball or football teams you want me to check, please do. And if they have more than 2.5 million fans they would be added to the table.

No, no. What I meant was that with, say, the Chicago Bulls, for example, they're the Chicago Bulls and that's it. But with, say, Notre Dame, there's the university, the football team, the men's basketball team, etc. It would just be too hard to parse them all, I would think . . .

But the point wasn't that they would have a similar number of fans as the professional teams globally, rather just that I was curious as to what the numbers would be . . .

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Interesting that the Bulls have so many fans, probably most coming from the Jordan era perhaps??

Big part of it no doubt. Chicago is a gigantic market also.

 

[illram]

Makes sense. Basketball and baseball have more of an international presence than American Football. Even if it's just a fashion thing, e.g. wearing a Yankees hat or a Bulls jersey.

 

[dgfred]

Interesting that the Bulls have so many fans, probably most coming from the Jordan era perhaps??

Yep... and them (parents) telling (and showing) their kids how good Jordan was .

 

[Marla_Singer]

Yep... and them (parents) telling (and showing) their kids how good Jordan was .

From Europe, I can tell you that everyone knows Michael Jordan, even people who have never watched a single game of basketball in their whole life.

LeBron James or people like that are very far from the audience Michael Jordan reached in the 1990's. But NBA is still very popular in Europe nevertheless. We also have many Europeans playing in the US and people tend to follow the teams in which they play.

I know for instance that the San Antonio Spurs are very popular here in France because of Tony Parker. In the same way, you guys probably don't even know Joakim Noah, but he's the son of a French tennis player who was famous over here in the 1980's and he currently plays for the Chicago Bulls. This also generates a following from a French audience.

What is true for basketball is of course also true for football, at an even larger scale. People playing in top European clubs come from dozens and dozens of different countries generating an international following. The fans from European clubs in the top10 are far to be European only, they come from all continents.

 

[sophie]

Makes sense. Basketball and baseball have more of an international presence than American Football. Even if it's just a fashion thing, e.g. wearing a Yankees hat or a Bulls jersey.

Yeah this. As JayZ noted: "I made a yankee hat more famous than a yankee can"

Plus sporting basketball jerseys ("a shirt with a team") was a big part of hip hop culture at the turn of the millennium. So that plays into it as well.

 

[dgfred]

Hey Marla. I know who Noah is... and watched his dad play tennis .

I even know a few of your football players .

 

[MacAttack]

Those of us who follow college sports also know who Noah is, being part of the National Championship winning Florida Gators team.

At any rate, the difference between a professional club fan is far different from a NCAA fan. I draw this from personal experience, I am a huge Club America fan, and a Mexican National Football (Soccer for those keeping score at home) team fan. But that only extends to Football/Soccer. On the other hand, I am a Texas A&M fan that stems from the fact that im an alumnus as well. I watch and root for nearly all teams that Texas A&M has competing. I can't sit through 9 innings of the Astros, but when it came to college baseball, I watched a ton of college baseball in the past few months. Heck, I watched Olympic swimming during the London Games because we had Texas A&M student athletes competing. So I am not sure if trying to distinguish sports college fans follow would be appropriate. American College sports many not have world wide appeal anyway. I wonder how many students at Texas A&M Univ. at Qatar (yes we have an engineering school there) watch Aggie Football games, or what kind of attendance will the Aggie basketball team draws during its summer tour in Italy.

And like Timsup2nothin said, you indicated this list is for professional sports teams, so no need to go through that headache imo.

 

[ummmm........]

I suppose you will all just have to forgive my curiosity. It's the unfortunate byproduct of a liberal education