Urban scaling of football followership on Twitter

Abstract

Social sciences have an important challenge today to take advantage of new research opportunities provided by large amounts of data generated by online social networks. Because of its marketing value, sports clubs are also motivated in creating and maintaining a stable audience in social media. In this paper, we analyze followers of prominent footballs clubs on Twitter by obtaining their home locations. We then measure how city size is connected to the number of followers using the theory of urban scaling. The results show that the scaling exponents of club followers depend on the income of a country. These findings could be used to understand the structure and potential growth areas of global football audiences.