Football is one of the most popular sports followed online, with YouTube dominating views for football-related video content. Football views over the last year have grown for 63% comparing to the same period of the last year. Every sports competition are using social media as a tool for growth. Average daily views in the past 30 days have exceeded 100M views, football definitely benefits from using social media.
Football-related video content generated 133 billion views of the significant social video sites in 2017
70% more Football videos were uploaded to YouTube than Facebook in 2017
Branded football content attracts 22% more views than the average category
Ronaldo is the most popular football player for YouTube views
UK Premier League YouTube “fan channels” today are growing 3.6X that of Premier League official club channels.
The numbers are just insane, over the past year, 93B views on Youtube are just from Football content where instead, “only” 23B views on Facebook, which dominates the 25% of the market, and surprising 5% are coming from Vine.
Football Breakdown | % of total views by category, last year
The main YouTube influencers in football are gamers, skills and freestylers and episodic content creators, with a 40% of the market shares, as mentioned in a previous blog post, people love learning from videos and watching what people do with their skills and this is why this video grabs more views then Brands and Clubs, which anyway they still get 22% between them.“Best of” player video compilations are a missed opportunity, particularly for main brands in this category such as adidas, Nike, Puma and EA. We recommend that brands try to connect with the football audience by creating content in the genres of Football, Entertainment, Sports and Comedy.
Working with football/gaming influencers can increase a brand’s visibility, engagement and likability on YouTube. There were over a thousand comments on YouTube about “Wembley Cup” ; 15% of these included the word “like”, “best”, “great”or “thank(s)”. Branded content is very successful when including multiple YouTubers in episodic content.
EASPORTS FIFA gaming content is a large percentage of views
A rising star from the previous year are Football club “fan channels” they are starting to get a lot of engagement and views with the most famous one ArsenalFanTv with an amazing 736K subscribed to the channel.
As expected 92% of the football audience on YouTube is between 13 – 34 years old and also 93% male and 7% female. Football views are quite global, but the UK are the largest audience with a 20% of the total views.
