If football teams gained points based on their Facebook followings, Chelsea would be London's top club with over 13 million fans on its official fan page.
Official club fan pages
- Chelsea 13,466,625
- Arsenal 11,618,595
- Tottenham Hotspur 1,443,999
- West Ham United 284,263
- Fulham 148,142
- Queens Park Rangers 135,617
- AFC Wimbledon 15,141
- Brentford FC 13,163
- Charlton Athletic 12,259
- Crystal Palace 9,317
- Dagenham and Redbridge 4,399
- Millwall FC 3,006
- Barnet FC 1,659
- Leyton Orient 867
(Numbers recorded at midday on 23 October 2012.)
By comparison, Manchester United has more official fans than all the London clubs put together, with 28,113,632 followers, plus dozens of large unofficial fan pages around the world.
Unofficial pages
In addition to club-ran pages, all London's clubs have a number of unofficial fan-led pages. In some cases (Palace and Orient, for example), these are much larger than the official sites. If we factor in fan pages, the lower half of the table changes around, but the top six clubs are unaffected.
- Chelsea 14,986,530
- Arsenal 12,278,106
- Tottenham Hotspur 1,473,356
- West Ham United 335,524
- Fulham 173,147
- Queens Park Rangers 165,778
- Crystal Palace 56,153
- Millwall FC 29,412
- AFC Wimbledon 21,996
- Charlton Athletic 21,088
- Brentford FC 15,449
- Leyton Orient 14,921
- Dagenham and Redbridge 5,919
- Barnet FC 5,566
To compile this list, we summed all the sites listed on the first page of search results on Facebook. For bigger clubs like Chelsea, the totals would be even higher were we to include pages two and three. Note, for the sake of simplicity, we've also excluded searchers for terms like 'Gunners' and 'Spurs', although a quick play suggests that their inclusion wouldn't affect the overall rankings.
So, Chelsea is our overall winner on Facebook. But who would win on Twitter? We looked at this a couple of years ago and found that Arsenal romped away with the title. Next week, we'll look again at the numbers to see if Chelsea or any other team comes close.