Chock-full of statistics, sports are always ripe for rankings and comparisons. But there’s seldom been an empirical way to measure one of their most abstract dimensions: fandom. Nielsen’s new Scarborough NFL Fandom Index, however, provides some insight into the matter—at least for the NFL.
Built on the latest edition of the company’s nationally syndicated consumer study that surveys more than 200,000 U.S. adults every year, the index assessed the NFL’s 30 markets on eight key metrics to determine where the most avid football fans live. Those metrics were apparel purchases, event attendance, streaming, social media following, TV viewership, radio listening, betting intent, and overall interest level.
Buffalo, Kansas City, Green Bay, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia emerged as the markets with the highest composite fandom scores; the league’s largest media markets, Los Angeles and New York (which each have two teams), ranked last.
The entirety of the AFC North—whose four teams sit (largely) within the Ohio River Valley, an area that has famously produced some of the sport’s best coaches—landed in the top 10, too.
Considered together, a trend surfaces: the league’s smallest markets punch well above their weight in fandom, and vice versa.
