(Thanks to sportingintelligence for the graphic)
Whenever anything relating to Manchester United is published it is big news. Maybe not to everybody in the world but there are many who hang onto every word, written or spoken, about the reds.
There is talk of the stadium capacity being increased to around 80,000 in the near future and it will be full for almost every home game.
Do United do anything differently to the other top teams? They spend some of their close season touring far away places in order to give some of their fans the chance to see the players, (not to mention increasing the fanbase to make more money)!
The other top clubs do this as well. Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham, the teams making up the remainder of the current top six, all tour outside of Europe for the same reasons as United.
Of the top six only Liverpool have a history which comes close to matching that of United and, in Europe, is actually better. They have also expanded their stadium and now need to achieve some success in order to fill it.
But is history the reason United are so well supported? Is there much truth in the theory that many people chose to follow United due to sympathy after the Munich air disaster?
If that was the case then why, a generation or two later, do they still have such a massive fanbase? Surely after 59 years, although the sympathy remains, the majority of United fans now no longer have any direct memory of the event.
They are not the most successful team in Europe. Until relatively recently they were not the most successful team in England, yet they have been the best supported for a very long time now.
Social media only confirms their popularity compared with other teams. Our articles are accessible through Scoop Dragon Publishing and their aggregate sites ManUNews and ManCityNews. If we publish a piece about the two clubs, unbiased and evenly shared, we can guarantee that the viewers from the United site will outnumber those of the City site by about 56 to 1, so still a fair way to go for City.
Social media vehicles such as Facebook have also shrunk the world in respect of the amount of time needed to spread any news from Old Trafford and the amount of comments on anything United is quite amazing. They range from in-depth analyses of games and potential transfers, to simple remarks which, quite truthfully, seem to be put there just as an alternative to leaving an empty space.
There will be comments such as “GGMU“, that’s it, nothing else! Or somebody else will write “Like if you think Man U is great“. Childish stuff but, then again, we have to remember that a lot of children around the world have access to the internet and support Manchester United.
One statistic which must be encouraging for the bean-counters at United is that more than 70% of the comments on social media are from people outside of the UK, which means one of two things. Either their marketing campaigns are working or, far more likely, there is a history of support worldwide which is now much more evident thanks to social media. Through this medium supporters in all parts of the globe can feel as though they are closer to United and the players.
If there is one major reason for this phenomenal support then it remains a mystery and one which other clubs would dearly love to solve
Whatever the reason it appears that, even with ground expansions and extensive tours, the rest of the top six still have some way to go to catch United in the fanbase stakes.
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 