New study ranks the NFL's best and worst fan bases; where's yours?
As if Patriots fans needed yet another reason to feel good about themselves, a new Emory University study has ranked New England as tops among the NFL’s 32 fan bases. At the opposite end of the spectrum: the Chiefs, Raiders, and Jaguars.
The study, conducted by Dr. Mike Lewis of Emory’s Goizueta School of Business, measures teams’ brand equity—broadly defined, the level of support each team enjoys in the form of dollars spent, miles traveled, and social media assaulted by its fan base. You can dig into the methodology here, but in basic terms, if a team’s fans spend more money than expected on a team, that team ranks ever higher.
Key statistical data that nobody’s going to read: the study controls for both market size and short-term variations in performance. In other words, larger markets don’t get a bump, and neither do teams who do exceptionally well (or poorly) over a brief period of time (i.e., the Chiefs). This is a long-haul award.
The top five teams shouldn’t really come as a surprise: the Patriots in first, followed by the Cowboys, Broncos, 49ers, and Eagles. All enjoy broad, even nationwide fan support, even through some rough patches in recent years (and, in the case of San Francisco, for the foreseeable future). Love ’em or hate ’em, you can’t deny that the fans of these five teams show up in big, loud numbers. The Patriots just edged out the Cowboys, largely because of New England’s larger social media following. So take to Twitter, Cowboys fans, and take back your title there.
At the other end of the spectrum, also unsurprisingly, are the Bills, Rams, Chiefs, Raiders, and Jaguars. It’s worth noting that three of these teams have been living under the implied (and, in one case, realized) threat of moving for most of the past few years, so you can understand why the fan bases there wouldn’t exactly throw down their dollars. The Chiefs have had some recent success that, if it continues, could move them up the rankings. The Jaguars, meanwhile, are the current trendy bandwagon playoff pick, which, if it comes to pass, could both raise the team out of the last-place spot and bring about the apocalypse.
Everyone else fits in the middle somewhere; you can find your own team’s rankings right here.
There’s one outlier among all this, and the study addresses it specifically: the Pittsburgh Steelers. Long known as one of the most rabid fan bases in the NFL, the Steelers rank only 18th in the Emory study. Why? In a strange statistical anomaly, the fact that the Steelers’ ticket prices are low relative to the overall market actually hurts the team in this particular ranking methodology. In other words, Steelers fans would probably pay more, and thus move up in the rankings, if their ticket prices were higher than an average $84 apiece.
“It may well be that the Steelers ownership makes a conscious effort to underprice relative to what the market would allow,” Lewis writes. “The high attendance rates across the NFL do suggest that many teams could profitably raise prices.” (Dude! Don’t let the owners know that!)
If there’s anything fans love more than arguing about how good their own team is, it’s arguing about what great fans they are. This study should provide plenty of kindling for a fire to burn until the season kicks off.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION, on sale now at Amazon or wherever books are sold. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.
