Which Football Team Has The Most Fans?

Have you ever wondered which football team has the most fans? Some fans love that only hundreds of people support their local club. Others love knowing that their club has a worldwide fanbase. Which one are you?

If you get warm and fuzzy knowing your club gets love from around the world then you will enjoy finding out who the most popular clubs are, read on.

Years ago, you could count fans based on ticket sales. As teams went global, it became harder to track. So who has the most fans?

To answer this, we need to decide how we are going to measure what is a “fan”.

Money Made

We could measure by how much money a club makes, but the data is muddy at best. You can support a team without ever purchasing something from the club.

Working out which are the wealthiest clubs is a subject for a different article, for now, let’s assume that we don’t equate money to fan loyalties.

If you are interested in club wealth, here is an article answering How much is Arsenal worth? (a lot)

Tickets Sold

Related to money made is the number of tickets sold. Ticket sales used to be a straightforward metric that you could use. If a team had more ticket sales year on year, you could assume their fanbase is growing. Since so many clubs are global now, you can’t rely on ticket sales.

We can’t even count who watches matches online or on TV. The data for this is all over the place. You cannot know that someone was watching a game because they support a team versus if they wanted to watch the football.

Social Media Following

It isn’t fair to say everyone has a social media account these days, but enough do that this is a good proxy for how many fans a team has.

Following a team on Facebook doesn’t mean you’re a fan. It is a powerful indicator and is something we can get precise data for. The social following of clubs will be the focus of our article moving forward.

The three social networks we’ve decided to get data for are:

Instagram
Facebook
Twitter

There is a huge caveat here that these social networks are very Western-centric. Football is very Western-centric in terms of where the big leagues are, so this feels like an excellent trade-off.

The Teams Everyone Talks About

Fifteen names kept coming up in my research. Teams that by their numbers of mentions alone suggest they are household names. All the usual suspects are on this list, but have we missed any out? Comment below, and we’ll include teams we’ve forgotten in future updates to this article.

Real Madrid
FC Barcelona
Manchester United
Chelsea
Juventus
Bayern Munich
Paris Saint-Germain
Liverpool
Arsenal
Manchester City
Inter Milan
AS Roma
Tottenham Hotspur
Borussia Dortmund
AC Milan

Each team is huge in its own right, with massive followings across the country, and, indeed, the world.

For each team, we’ve worked out how significant their social media presence is.

With all that in mind, as of June 2020, the teams look like this.