Premier League Twitter follower map offers global breakdown of club fan bases
Twitter has today unveiled a custom Premier League follower map which plots the geographic location of each of the leagues 20 clubs for the first time.
Built using data pulled from the official Twitter accounts of each team the map provides an at a glance summary of followers based on the team they support and where they happen to reside in the world, with scalable details allowing localised neighbourhood searches to be conducted within the UK.
Commenting on the map a Twitter spokesperson said: “The map was created by looking at the official Twitter accounts for each team, using their followers as an indicator of allegiance (as opposed to, say, instances in which people mention a team while watching an interesting matchup or talking about a team’s rival).
“Because each country divides municipalities differently (counties, states, territories, etc.), we employed a technique called hexagonal binning, which divides the map into equally-sized hexagons, like a honeycomb, so you can see fandom by region instead of treating each country as one big region.”
Amongst the maps more immediate conclusions is the dominance of Liverpool Football Club in the UK, with its popularity stretching from Merseyside to Scotland, south toward London and Wales and across the Irish Sea.
Elsewhere a clear split in allegiance is evident in Asia, with much of India and Pakistan backing Manchester United whilst Arsenal dominate Japan.