How many people support Manchester United?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, giving penalties for statistical fouls. I'm Ruth Alexander.
And I'm Wesley Stevenson. It was the match the world wanted to see. That was according to Real Madrid manager Jose Mourinho. The Champions League clash with Manchester United in the last 16 of the UEFA Champions League lived up to the hype and it ended one-all.
It's said that Real Madrid and Manchester United are two of the biggest teams in the world. But how many fans do they have worldwide?
At Old Trafford, you could see that Manchester United claim more than 600 million followers. Official documents for its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange last year said that this number is actually 659 million. Now, Real Madrid don't publish a worldwide figure, but their director of communications has been quoted in the past as saying the club has 300 million followers across the world, which is still pretty big.
But how do they know? How do you survey the world?
Well, the figure for Manchester United is based on research by a firm called Cantor Sport. Their global head is Richard Brinkman.
We put the questionnaire to 54,000 people in 39 countries around the world. They were mostly online questionnaires. What we asked them was, do you follow sport? Do you follow football? We then asked them spontaneously to tell me, which is your favourite football club? They weren't given a list. They just wrote down their favourite football club. Subsequent to that, do you follow any other football clubs?
So from this survey of 39 countries, Kantar then extrapolates these numbers to get a worldwide figure. So while they didn't survey every country in Africa, for example, they were able to use their results for the countries they did survey to predict the numbers for the other countries. Now, Richard also told me that they try to account for areas that don't have the internet. They look at past surveys in certain countries to see how popular football is. And they also look at things like whether players from particular countries have played for Manchester United in the past 30 years.
And they come up with this figure of 659 million followers.
Yes, and they always use followers and not fans. So I asked why.
Fans tends to have a connotation of people who attend matches. Obviously, in a global and internet age, followers is a far more varied and wide-reaching measure that allows people to know how many people they can potentially engage with.
But as a follower, is that someone who would say they support Manchester United?
Yes.
How many fans does Manchester United claim worldwide and where did that figure come from?
Yes, I think that's a fair assumption.
Is that an exclusive thing or will they follow more than one club?
They will follow more than one club.
So this is a survey of adults. That means that 659 million adults follow Manchester United worldwide.
That's more than one in ten of the world's population, which has raised a few eyebrows. Nick Harris, editor of the sports business website SportingIntelligence.com, points out that the last figure put out for the number of worldwide followers was 333 million. That was in 2007. So this means that Manchester United have doubled their following in just four years.
Which, if you think about it, is absolutely incredible. If true. Yes. Nick has also looked at the country-by-country breakdown in these figures and thinks that this throws up some odd results too.
Well, according to the survey, I mean, in South Korea, I think it was a third of the population. Now, Manchester United, until relatively recently, had a South Korean player called Park Ji-sung. It would not be surprising that Manchester United would be followed, in the loosest sense, by an enormous amount of people. However, how can it be that you can claim 15 million followers in a nation who are fans of that club, and yet a million or fewer of them can actually be bothered even to watch the games on television?
So how can these figures be right? I asked Richard Brinkman of Kantar Media how it was that the number of followers doubled between surveys and how there can be so many followers in individual countries.
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