Football on the Web: a survey of football fans
To get some level of understanding on the behavior of football fans on the Web I came up with a short on-line survey. I spread it through the forums of 4 Belgian Jupiler League teams (RSC Anderlecht, KRC Genk, SV Zulte Waregem, Cercle Brugge) and one (unofficial) Liverpool fan forum. This proved an easy way to get a good amount of participants and the visitors of such forums could well be the people my project should target. I also asked some friends of mine with an interest in football to fill it in. 192 people participated.
Age of the participants
No surprises here I believe. Over 60% of the participants are under 30 years old.
Even though the survey was done by visitors of football forums these results are surprising to me. About 30% of the participants indicated they spend 2 hours or more on average on visiting football-related websites a day.
Over 75% of the participants indicate they regularly visit 2-5 football-related websites. There are only a couple of participants who regularly visit over 10 football-related websites. Also, the chart resembles a blue pac man 
.
I included this question cause it seemed relevant to me not only how much time people spend in general but also how often the participants browse football-related sites a day. Over half of the participants indicate they visit football sites 6 times a day or less.
For each activity, the participants selected from 6 choices (from “not relevant” with weight 0 to “very important” with weight 5). The chart displays the average values. “News” comes out on top and “live scores”, “live game footage” and “to discuss football” aren’t far behind.
There are a couple of very good sites and mobile applications for live scores (livescore.com for example). These results make me wonder about live game footage. As far as I know there currently aren’t many football matches you can follow on-line. Some media companies offer the option to people who already subscribe to their sports channel (for example Sky in the UK). I’m afraid most of the people who indicate they watch games on-line watch illegal streams. I think this is another example of a slow response to changing demands, similar to what happened with the music industry and music downloads.
The survey also included an open ended question “Which football-related sites do you visit?”. The answers on these questions showed, like these results, that discussion is an important activity. A lot of users mentioned discussion forums in their answers.
“Statistics (league tables, goal-scorers,…)”, “interviews” and “video’s” are considered quite important (averages just below 3) as well. I assume a lot of football fans watch match reports and post game interviews on-line.
This is another view on the same results. Here you can see the different answers in perspective instead of the averages.
I listed the most prominent football social networks as answers to this question. I think these results show that the existing football social network sites are not popular. 37 out of 192 participants indicate they know FootyTube.com. In my post on existing football SNS I indicated that I thought FootyTube is one of the best football SNS that exist. Maybe this is because its most important feature is video’s. The results of the previous question indicate that watching video’s is regarded as quite an important activity.
My intention behind asking this question was to see whether other football fans had the same feeling as me; that it takes quite some effort to get the information on football that interests you. The answers are interesting yet not very conclusive. I think this was to be expected. Nonetheless, I believe it is interesting that 70 out of 192 participants agree (or “completely agree”) with this statement.
Nothing surprising here, most of the participants are already using a forum to discuss football.
Not much to conclude here in my opinion. I guess it depends on what the football SNS is going to be like.
Conclusion
I believe conducting this survey was useful. It provided me with some indications of how fans use the internet for their interest in football. However, it is important to keep the way in which this survey was conducted in mind (on-line, spread through fan forums).
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