With the AFL grand final this Saturday, there’s been a timely little poll release from Roy Morgan looking at the sporting and leisure behaviour of the supporters of the grand finalists.The estimates here derive from 12 months worth of Morgan data (July 2008 to June 2009) from their Roy Morgan Sports Monitor, which is a component of their Roy Morgan Single Source national surveys.
First up, Morgan collated an index of various sports and leisure activities undertaken by both Cats and Saints supporters and compared them to the national average. The index has been anchored so that a score of 100 is the national Australian average participation in each of these various activities. As a result, any score less than 100 is less than the national average while anything greater than 100 means that supporters of these clubs participate at a higher rate of than the national average.
The raw index from the rather eclectic selection of activities comes in like this.
But we can do something a bit more here. As a result of the way the index was calculated, we can measure the distance from the national average that each supporter base experiences for each sporting activity. The way to read it is a positive score is the percent more likely that a Saints or Cats supporter is to engage in a particular activity, compared to the national average. Conversely, a negative score is the percent less likely that a Saints or Cats supporter is to engage in a particular activity compared to the nati0nal average.
So we see that St Kilda supporters, for instance, are 24% more likely to participate in dancing and 81% more likely to participate in horse riding than the national average, while being 54% less likely to participate in motor sports, and 39% less likely to participate in shooting than the national average.
Also something worth pondering – again using Morgan data – is the way the supporter base of each of these teams has changed over the period of 2001 through to 2009.
Geelong is having a very good year!
If we look at the change in supporter numbers for all clubs between 2001 and 2009 – it comes in like this:
The Dockers and the Cats have had the largest change in supporter numbers over the period, while the Bombers, North Melbourne and Carlton have had the largest reduction in their supporter numbers. Anyways, whoever you support – good luck!
15 Comments
They really think the Swans have the most supporters?
Would love to go through that methodology…
The methodology is pretty simply – “Who do you support”.
The Swans basically have Australia’s largest city all to themselves.
It’s probably also why Brisbane comes in second.
And football correlates highly with beer so tomorrow afternoon will be deathly quiet in my home brew shop, especially as the SANFL final is on as well, with Sturt in it–Unley oval is just around the corner from my shop.
Hmmm homebrew business highly correlates negatively with rain
“Support” is a dodgy stat. What does it really mean? Does it mean “oh yeah they’re the team I like to win” or does it mean “they’re the team I’d die in a ditch for, and have to watch every game”?
They need a “strongly support”; “sort of support”.
I’d wager a high percentage of the Swan’s support is “sort of support”.
Grog@6
The easiest way to differentiate a passing interest in a club and the ‘proper’ supporters is to use club membership figures. While half of Sydney likes the Swans, only 1% of them like them enough to buy a membership. The Morgan figures are useful for the clubs becasue it gives an indication of their potential market to tap and I suspect ’supporters’ is a better tool than ‘members’ when deciding the draw, tv schedules etc.
@DrMick Not so sure on that differentiation. I’d “die in a ditch” for my NRL club (The mighty NQ Cowboys) but I’m not a member because I’m not in the same city, and it’s therefore pointless. There may be financial reasons for enthusiastic supporters to not be club members. Also, in my observation, the culture of joining a club as a mark of support is much more prevalent in AFL than in NRL, and perhaps Sydneysiders don’t see that as a necessary step to make as a supporter.
I think asking people who they support is a fair enough approach. On differentiating into “sort of” and “strong” support, not so sure. No one is going to admit to being a lukewarm supporter of their footy team…
Jason@9
Easiest, not necessarily the best. Most AFL clubs offer membership packages that don’t include ground entry to get pople who don’t/can’t go to the games to be members. The point I was trying to make is that while Sydney has the most supporters, they probably have the lowest percentage of supporters who are prepared to contribute financially to their club.
O dear another dodgy survey on AFL,the Swans do not have anything like the support indicated in Sydney,What percentage is 30,000 in a city of 5 million,unfortunately AFL in Sydney is a minor sport,whether Morgan like it or not,and the Brisbane figures are just as dogdy
Oh Poss, north of the Rio Tweed. Not you too! I’d hoped that a man with your sense and sensibilities and your graph-like mind might have done some interesting stuff showing how footy appeals, in the main, to the intellectually-deprived hoons and the bonza* macho supporters like Rex Hunt who always speak as if their nuts are caught in an iron jock strap. Alas and alack it was not to be.
I hope it takes you six months to find a lady possum. So there!
BIONot I know a laundromat called Bonza. I thought the word had got out of our speech.