Here we reveal the size of each Premier League club's TikTok following on a local level, plus how a team's popularity varies by age group.
For over a decade now, social media has replaced the terraces as the main form of communication between football clubs and their supporters.
Depending on whether it’s Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) or TikTok, a Premier League club can boast tens or even hundreds of millions of followers who regularly engage with them on social media.
Focussing on TikTok, we can discover the popularity of Premier League clubs by analysing the locations of the people who follow and engage with them.
Compared to other established social media platforms, TikTok is also more likely to be popular with the 18-24 year-old age bracket, therefore we can see how popularity of Premier League clubs varies among younger generations of supporters.
Our research
We pulled data from TikTok Audience Insights on how many fans each Premier League club has by location. We filtered these results for various locations, including the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Using this metric as a proxy for 'fans', we then ranked the most popular Premier League clubs in our chosen locations. We repeated this process for fans in different age brackets.
Manchester United are the Most Popular Club Among TikTok fans Based in the United Kingdom
Although they aren’t the Premier League club with the most followers overall on TikTok (they are second behind Tottenham Hotspur*), Manchester United's UK fan base is the Premier League's largest on the platform.
There are 3.2 million UK-based Man Utd fans on TikTok. Already widely known as one of the world’s most supported football clubs, previous findings by the CIES Football Observatory further supported this in a ranking of global football clubs that revealed Man Utd had the world's third-highest following combined from Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok at 216.3 million.
AFC Bournemouth have the lowest number of TikTok fans based in the United Kingdom. While this may seem small in comparison to other clubs, 102,500 would be the equivalent to more than 50% of Bournemouth's real life population.
*The data does not directly reflect a club's follower numbers. Premier League fan bases are distributed differently throughout various countries, and TikTok Audience Insights considers users who regularly engage with a club's content even if they don't follow the club.
How Premier League support varies by age group in the UK, according to TikTok
With TikTok’s audience being predominantly in the 18-24 age bracket, every Premier League club’s Gen Z support makes up the highest proportion of any age group on TikTok.
However, we can see how the strength of Gen Z support varies proportionally among each club. Brentford’s TikTok fanbase in the Gen Z age group makes up the largest (52%) of any Premier League team's in comparison to the amount of fans in other age groups.
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At the other end of the Gen Z table, Newcastle Utd, Nottingham Forest and Man Utd’s fan bases on TikTok are the least likely to be in the 18-24 year-old age bracket. Despite this, Man Utd boast the most UK-based Gen Z fans on TikTok overall at 1.19 million.
Man City Overtakes Man United and Liverpool as Ireland's Favourite Premier League Club
Manchester United and Liverpool are often named as Ireland’s favourite Premier League clubs, based on the number of fans they have in the country.
However, according to TikTok users, it is Manchester City who have won the popularity contest. The current Premier League champions boast 532,000 TikTok fans based in Ireland, which is 99,500 more than their cross-city rivals Man Utd, who are in second place with 432,500 fans.
It is also surprising to see Arsenal beat Liverpool as the third most popular Premier League club among Ireland’s TikTok users.
The North London club boasts 299,500 TikTok fans compared to Liverpool’s 238,000. Although neither club can match Man City's recent trophy-winning streak, both clubs have been the main challengers during the 2020s in attempting to wrestle the Premier League back from City.
Methodology
Using TikTok Audience Insights, analysts at SportingPost.com took the number of fans per Premier League club based in different countries. TikTok classifies its users according to the interests and the hashtags they engage with. We took these users as a proxy for 'fans' if TikTok identifies a club as one of their interests. These figures represent the number of fans of clubs in specific locations—they are not directly comparable to the total number of TikTok followers that a club has.
Data correct as of August 2024 and only considers TikTok users aged 18 or above.
You are welcome to reuse and interpret this research for any purpose, but please credit it with a link to the article.
