Facebook

The National Football League is one of the most popular sports in America with some incredibly devoted fans. At Facebook we have about 35 million account holders in the United States who have Liked a page for one of the 32 teams in the league, representing one of the most comprehensive samples of sports fanship ever collected. Put another way, more than 1 in 10 Americans have declared their support for an NFL team on Facebook.

Winning Fans Over

Are people fans of a team because of their friends, their hometown, or just because that team enjoys some success? It certainly looks like winning helps. We looked at how many users clicked "Like" for each team's page on each day throughout the season. On any given day during the season a team either doesn't play, loses, or wins (we'll ignore ties). Because playoff teams get so much more attention, we'll break out separate categories for games during the playoffs.

Most teams are accruing new fans on Facebook throughout the season, but teams who win are doing it faster. Making the playoffs, whether you win or lose, seems to give a team's Facebook page a huge boost in fans. Some people just like to hop aboard the bandwagon.

Hometown Fans

While winning seems to matter, NFL teams have local followings that are probably heavily influenced by family ties and/or where a person grew up,  so we were obviously curious to see where the fans for various teams live now. By considering the physical locations of NFL fans, we can construct a map of the top team for each county in the US. It tells an interesting story about the ways that football rivalries and allegiances alternately divide and unite the country, and sometimes even individual states.

In some cases, whole states and even entire regions of the country uniformly support a single team.  For instance the Vikings are easily the only game in town in Minnesota, while New England appears to be comprised of entirely Patriots fans except for a small portion of Connecticut.

There are some states which are divided into regions by teams.  Florida has three teams--the Tampa Bay Bucs, Miami Dolphins, and the Jacksonville Jaguars--and Facebook users there seem fractured in their support, with some counties even defecting to teams from the North. Ohio is another interesting story, with the Cleveland Browns in the North, Cincinnati Bengals in the South, and Pittsburgh Steelers fans occupying the middle of the state.

Some teams, like the Steelers, Cowboys, and Packers, seem to transcend geography, with pockets of fans all over the country. On the other end of the spectrum, the Jets have to share New York with the Giants and are only the most popular team for a single stronghold county in Long Island.

At the start of the playoffs in early January, only 12 teams were still playing football. We can create the same map of the most Liked teams by county while removing the 20 non-playoff teams. Here we see the playoff map:

It's striking just how much geographic area of the country was rooting for the Denver Broncos come January. You may also notice that with the the home-area fans of some teams removed from the sample, the remaining fans often Like one of their rivals. Tennessee, home of the Titans, became an extension of the Indianapolis Colts fan-base at the start of the playoffs. Most Facebook users in Illinois, usually fervent Chicago Bears fans, were probably hoping the rival Packers would continue their regular season success.

We created maps for the subsequent rounds of the playoffs to show how the fans of remaining teams were distributed geographically as the post-season progressed.

With only two teams left for the Super Bowl we see a country divided more or less by geography, with 49ers fans dominating the West and the Ravens being the most popular in counties in the mid-Atlantic and Southern states.

Fan Friendships

Even the most die-hard fans among us have some friends who root against us. While it turns out that most friendships between NFL fans on Facebook are between fans of the same team,  we wondered, what about the rest of the friendships? Which rival teams' fans are most likely to hang out on Sunday to bond over beer and wings despite their conflicting allegiances?

The following table shows the top 5 fan-friendships for each team in the league, excluding friendships between users who like the same team.

No matter which team you root for, it's pretty likely you'll have a friend who is Cowboys or Steelers fan, which is maybe unsurprising given their country-wide support,.  Other friendships appear to be driven by geographical proximity, such as with the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders, while other friendships bridge division rivalries, such as the large number of friendships between Bears and Packers fans. Some teams seem to be isolated in the friend graph; neither the St. Louis Rams nor the Kansas City Chiefs crack to top 5 friendships for any other team's fans.  However, overall NFL fans appear to be a very social group who enjoy the game with like-minded sports fans, regardless of their particular allegiances.

Analysis and graphics by Sean J. Taylor, an intern on the Data Science team. Special thanks to Daniel Merl, Carolyn Aler, and Cameron Marlow for valuable feedback. Choropleth maps created using D3.