Top 20 European Football Clubs: Facebook League Table, March 2011

Attached to this post, you will find our updated Facebook League Table for the Top 20 Football Clubs in Europe covering the period February to March, 2011. You can view previous posts in this series here:

A number of interesting results emerge compared to the position in January/February:

• Barcelona remain top of the Facebook League Table following a month of high growth – an average of 53,024 new ‘likers’ per day for the period covered. They have become the first European football club to break through the 10m fan barrier. Based on current growth predictions, they should retain their No. 1 position moving into March/April.
• In our February post we predicted that Man Utd would achieve this accolade but Barcelona more than doubled their rate of growth from the previous month. A major contributing factor was the ‘Messi 10 Million‘ video mentioned in a previous post. In contrast, the growth in fans for Manchester United is lower than for the two major Spanish clubs putting them in danger of falling to 3rd place over the next few months.
• Other clubs making good progress on their rivals include Arsenal, who we predict will overtake Liverpool into 4th place by next month and Bayern Munich who will overtake Olympique Marseille. Werder Bremen and Schalke04 continue to grow quickly, but the fastest growth rates (apart from Valencia – see below) have been recorded by Internazionale and Hamburg SV, both of whom increased their ‘liker’ base by 61% over the period covered – a very impressive growth rate given the already high number of ‘likers’ on each site. Internazionale have already moved up three places in the last month and look set to overtake Werder Bremen by next month. Hamburg SV have gained a place and look set to leapfrog Schalke 04.
• In our February post, Glasgow Celtic had been the fastest growing Club recording a 66% increase in ‘likers’. This was partly due to the fact that their Facebook page had only recently been set up. Not surprisingly, this growth rate has not been maintained. However, apart from the two Clubs mentioned above, Celtic remain the fastest growing page with an increase of 33% in the number of ‘likers’ compared to the previous month. Our forecast is that Celtic will have over 75,000 ‘likers’ by this time next month – a very impressive achievement for a Club playing in a small domestic league with limited international TV coverage.
• The position of Valencia is worth noting, with a growth in their Facebook fan base of 2,279% from 4,890 ‘likers’ in February to over 116,000 in March. Our investigations suggest that this unusually high growth rate has been due to the ‘takeover’ of an unofficial Facebook fan page by the Club. A Valencia page with almost 84,000 fans was ‘deleted’ by Facebook on the 27th February. We can only assume that all of these fans were transferred to the Official Valencia page… see image below.

As usual, feedback and comment are very welcome.

Jim, Alan and Vincent

Top 20 European Football Clubs Facebook League Table March 2011