Football fans study - Who has the most local fans in the Premier League?
The Premier League is just days away and the old club rivalries will be resuming once again. Battles between fans has been a cornerstone to the English top flight’s success but one company, have asked just what correlation of fans support their team based on location and what percentage follow due to their historical impact.
The study, conducted by Rightmove in April this year, looked to find out the answer to the criticisms and jokes leveled at the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool – they have strong support but are the fans loyalties due to growing up in the area or down to the successful nature of that club.
After asking 13,434 Premier League supporters the company have sifted through the results to produce a table of support to location ratio, which has found Wigan to be the team that has the most amount of supporters within the same postcode as the club’s base.
However, as well as breaking down the support by postcode they also looked at major sporting cities as a whole to see which club rose to the top in a larger area. In London, for example, Arsenal are the most supported club but despite six Premier League sides only three teams that are based in the capital make the top five – Manchester United and Liverpool are 3rd and 4th respectively.
Conversely no London side makes it into the top five for the two other major sporting cities – Liverpool and Manchester – instead each being filled out by teams in the north of the country. In Liverpool for example, 1 in four fans support Everton meaning there is a 75% chance that a Merseyside football fan will follow the Reds.
In Manchester the statistics aren’t too dissimilar with Manchester United taking the supports 56% to City’s 15%.
Rightmove compiled these results after asking fans their Premier League side and their postcode. They then matched the distance of each address to each club stadium to determine the distance between club and fan as well as percentage of fans living within the same postcode as their team.
The results seemed to find that the more successful as side has been the lower down on the local support chart they appear. The four Premier League winners’ that are currently in the division make up three of the bottom six clubs.
As would be expected, towns with one team have a significantly higher percentage of fans living with the same postcode as the stadium e.g. Wigan, Southampton etc.. Whereas in an area such as London the percentages are much lower.
It is important to note that this survey does not question a fans’ support but does create an interesting concept on how we support our clubs - with five of the bottom six taking up all but one of the top six in last year’s table.
[Source: Rightmove Property Portal]
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