America’s stadiums may be silent, but its fans aren’t, and the Cheeseheads of Green Bay are proving that they are the loudest of them all: The Lambeau loyalists come out on top in the Forbes ranking of the best fans in sports.
Measuring passion is a tricky thing. Crazy certainly helps, but Pope hats, gold and black death paint, and gladiator getups aren’t the reason New Orleans Saints fans rank third on our list. We look at more concrete evidence, including television ratings, game attendance, merchandise sales and social media reach. We evaluated every one of North America’s 123 professional teams in the NBA, the NFL, the NHL and MLB.
One takeaway: NFL fans are the most devoted, with fans of the league’s 32 teams grabbing six of the top ten spots. The most blasé? Hockey and baseball fans, each with only one franchise represented.
The Forbes best fans ranking looks at local television ratings (per Nielsen), stadium attendance based on capacity reached, secondary ticket demand (per StubHub), merchandise sales (per Fanatics), social media reach (Facebook and Twitter followers based on the team’s metro area population) and hometown crowd reach (defined by Nielsen as a percentage of the metropolitan area population that watched, attended and/or listened to a game in the last year) of the biggest sports leagues in North America. Information for women’s sports leagues was unavailable. Although some information was unavailable for some Canadian teams, there was enough to include them here, and those teams were not penalized for the missing information in the ranking. The ranking accounts for bandwagon fans by factoring in three years of data to offset any single-season anomalies. To be fair in determining social media reach, in the multi-team markets, we divided the population accordingly. Merchandise is based on units moved, not dollars spent. No correlation was noted between Forbes’ annual NBA, NFL, NHL or MLB valuations and this ranking.
Read the full profile on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinasettimi/2020/05/06/americas-most-passionate-sports-fans-2020/#2de699092365
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America’s Most-Passionate Sports Fans 2020 | The Countdown | Forbes