Manchester United tops the Internet football league

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 23 July 2008 16:41

Business IT - Networking

Football is a popular sport in England, in fact for many it is something of an obsession and one that has spread to the Internet and way beyond English borders. A study of visitors to the official websites of English Premiership football clubs has meant that it is now possible to rate the teams in terms of an Internet football league. So where will your team feature?

comScore has just released the results of its study into the visitor figures for English Premiership football teams, or rather the official websites for those teams. While it should come as no great surprise that Manchester United tops the online league table, it was slightly more of a shock to learn just how popular English football is with the global audience. The mainstay Premierleague website gets the majority of its online audience from outside of the UK, a rather impressive 55 percent of it to be precise.

Based upon data drawn from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service, this study reveals that the majority of traffic to the big four teams of English soccer, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and of course Manchester United, is also driven by overseas visitors.
 
As for the figures themselves, well the Premierleague website, which acts as the official online presence of the FA Barclays Premier League, managed to attract an average of 1.2 million British visitors each month during the 2007/08 season which runs from August 2007 through to May 2008. The official Manchester United website was the most popular amongst domestic visitors with a monthly average of 912,000. However, this was only 25,000 ahead of second placed Liverpool but far ahead of the rest of the bunch. Even big names such as Arsenal could only manage a relatively poor 718,000 visitors while the big surprise of the big four performances has to be football league powerhouse Chelsea which attracted a measly 402,000 monthly visitors on average.

comScore calculated the top 10 premiership club websites by ranking them based upon the average monthly number of unique visitors from the UK during the football season. It covered access from both home and work locations, but was restricted to visitors aged 15 years or over. The numbers also exclude searches made from public computers such as those in Internet Cafes or access from mobile phones.

Read on to discover who made it into the Top 10 Premiership Football Club Websites league...

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