Most outwardly supported football club (The race to 50)

Most outwardly supported football club (The race to 50)

So I went to the football world cup (or should I say ‘The FIFA Disneyworld Cup™’) in South Africa last year. Whilst I was there, my friend and I noticed something quite glaringly obvious: That the most outwardly supported club football team were not, contrary to popular belief, Manchester United, but in fact Arsenal. By outwardly supporting I mean sporting of their shirt. Of course, we saw more international shirts depending which match we were at. But amongst the hundreds of thousand of supporters we saw at our 3 stadium matches and numerous other matches viewed from fan parks, there was no doubt that Arsenal were, by a long way, the most popular team.

With this now in my consciousness, I began to notice the trend repeating itself upon my return to England. Though, I didn’t know whether I was just noticing Arsenal shirts more now because I had become aware of this. So, after a few months, I decided to conduct my own little survey to test whether it was actually the case or not. Now, I know this sounds sad, but really this is the sort of thing that makes me tick. Numbers. I love them. I’m constantly making my own little charts of things and analysing the data. Hardly any of it ever reaches the public domain, a lot even doesn’t even get to my friends (I do like to be able to still have friends!), but lucky you, this one is coming out. I called it, ‘The race to 50‘.

I began the survey some time in September of 2010 and it came to its conclusion on June 21st this year when one team (guess who?!) won the race to 50.

Now, I had a few rules in place:
– If I was in the area of a team playing that day they did not count (hard luck to the Bristol teams).
– I also did not include any shirts worn by people I know, most of which were Arsenal ones anyway!
– I included national shirts for this survey.
– Carried out in England only. So when I went to Spain in May it was suspended (though the very first football shirt I saw was worn by a Spanish boy on the Xerex to Cadiz train …and it was …an Arsenal one).

I carried out the survey by noting down in my phone every time I saw a shirt of a football team being worn and then adding them to my spreadsheet when back at my computer at home.

So, below is the final table. Needless to say Arsenal were ahead for the whole time and only saw a close finish due to a late Manchester United surge.

50 Arsenal
47 Manchester United
39 Liverpool
33 England
21 Chelsea
14 Bristol City
11 Spurs
5 Man City
5 Bristol Rovers
4 Nottingham Forest
4 Barcelona
3 Real Madrid
3 Portsmouth
3 Newcastle
3 Aston Villa
2 West Ham
2 West Brom
2 Rangers
2 Leicester
2 Leeds
2 Holland
2 AC Milan
1 Sunderland
1 Spain
1 Sheffield United
1 Reading
1 QPR
1 Lincoln
1 Japan
1 Ivory Coast
1 France
1 Everton
1 Czech Republic
1 Colchester
1 Celtic
1 Cardiff
1 Burnley
1 Bulgaria
1 Brazil
1 Blackpool
1 Blackburn
1 Atletico Madrid