Wednesday, January 30, 2013

NFL Fans Map

Sean Taylor at Facebook took the approximate 35 million users who have "Liked" a National Football League team's fan page, and put it into this awesome map.


Taking this from a Steelers fan perspective, this map is particularly interesting. As expected, Steelers fans dominate Western and Central Pennsylvania, all of West Virginia and significant parts of Ohio. Perhaps not as expected is that the Steelers appear to be the most popular team in Hawaii, large parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, and areas of Alaska, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nebraska, New York, Kentucky, North Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Florida. Since I love maps, I really can look at this map for hours.

Facebook also went a step further. As Barry Petchesky of Deadspin writes, "If you're a fan of one team, who are your friends most likely to be fans of? Here are the top five most common allegiances for Facebook friends of fans of each team. Once again, geography rules—except for the large numbers of Cowboys, Steelers, and Patriots fans on everybody's list."


I hate to admit it, but based on this information, it appears that the Cowboys truly are the most popular team (at least according to people on Facebook) in the United States.

h/t Deadspin


Update: I really can't stop looking at this map. Maybe it's because I am part of the Steelers diaspora, but I am fascinated by teams that have little to no support in places outside of its own vicinity. (I'm looking at you Jacksonville, San Diego, Tampa Bay, and yes, even Baltimore and Philadelphia.)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This map is a nightmare for color-blind people like myself. But if there is one thing that I am taking away from it is that it confirms that there are way too many Cowboy fans in the world.

Steelers in 2013!

Anonymous said...

poor representation in certain area, we did the same project gathering data and imputed the data through Arc GIS over 2 years and got different results especially amongst the data pertains to steeler fans, South Carolina were predominantly Falcon fans except for 4 counties being panther fans, northwestern ohio were predominantly lions fans, central ohio was almost an even split between cleveland and cincinnati, and not one county west of Louisville were found to be steeler fans. We did get almost identical results for California and Texas.