Real Madrid has won the world championship when it becomes the team with the largest number of followers on social networks according to annual statistics of the specialized website Sports Intelligence.
By the end of November, Real Madrid had more than 223 million followers on its Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts. In particular, the Spanish Royal team is still the top in each individual social networking accounts although Zinadine Zidane’s army is struggling this season.
Second place is Barcelona, who are currently in the La Liga rankings 2 points ahead of the Bernabeu Stadium (39 versus 37) before the winter break. Accordingly, the Catalan team has 213.6 million followers on the three social networks mentioned above, and affirms the dominance of the two football giants of Spain compared to the remaining teams.
The third and fourth places, respectively, belong to Manchester United and Chelsea in the Premier League, in which the number of followers of these two teams is also not equal to Barcelona. Old Trafford has 126 million followers on social networks, while Chelsea own more than 81 million.
Of the three social networking platforms mentioned above, Real Madrid and Barcelona are really hot on Facebook, where they have 110 and 103 million followers, respectively. La Liga has another member in the top 20, Atletico Madrid, the 15th place with nearly 27 million followers across all social networks, mostly from Facebook.
Football is almost exclusively on the list of the most followed teams in the world on social networks. The top 10 is dominated by clubs of five major European leagues, including the Premier League (5 clubs), La Liga (2) and Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 (each with 1 club). The team other than football with the largest number of followers on social networks is the Los Angeles Lakers Club from the leading basketball tournament in the USA (NBA), ranked 11th with 39 million followers. NBA also has the most members in the top 30 with a total of 7 teams.
According to AS newspaper, with the number of followers on social networks, Real Madrid Club President Florentino Pérez is believing in promoting advertising and marketing activities on this platform to expand the brand of the team around the globe. In particular, like Barcelona, Real Madrid is researching to have a separate page on Facebook to aim to make money through Facebook when subscribers will pay about 2.49 euros per month.
Meanwhile, despite being the most populous country in the world (about 1.4 billion people), China’s sports teams are outside the top 30, of which the team with the largest number of followers on Facebook is only reaching more than 100,000 people. This is understandable because China has its own social networking platforms, WeChat, Sina Weibo and Tencent.