The Following: method
Status: DRAFT — published for review. Figures in any accompanying table are marked NEEDS HUMAN CHECK until an Analyst signs them off.
Wire code: SW-FOL/METHOD
Filed: LONDON, 19 OCTOBER 2026
As of: 19 October 2026
The Following ranks clubs and franchises by strength of support. It does not rank how good a team is on the pitch or the field. It asks who turns up, who watches, who follows, who spends, and who cares about the result.
Two tables run from the same method. Per-sport tables appear monthly in season. The Following 50, a cross-sport table of fifty teams, appears each quarter: January, April, July and October.
Corrections go out as write-throughs: WRITETHRU: corrects attendance source for …. Clubs and readers may file an appeal with a sourced figure. Accepted appeals appear in the next table with a note.
ENDS
What is measured
Five pillars. Each is scored on its own, then combined. Every printed number carries a source URL and an as-of date. No model invents a figure. A person checks every figure before publication.
| Pillar | What it captures | Typical signals |
|---|---|---|
| Turnout | Who shows up | Average home attendance; attendance as a share of capacity; published season-ticket or membership counts |
| Reach | How many follow | Public follower counts on major platforms; Wikipedia page-view totals over a fixed window |
| Audience | How many watch | Published TV or streaming audiences for the team's matches |
| Spend | What fans buy | League merchandise rankings; jersey or shirt sales lists where a league or club publishes them |
| Interest | How much the result matters | Trading activity on the team's contests on MagicMarkets, normalised per fixture |
A team needs sourced data in at least three of the five pillars to be ranked. Otherwise it sits in a "Not yet ranked" list. A missing pillar is dropped and the remaining weights scale up. The table marks which pillars were used.
Intensity and Scale
Raw numbers do not cross sports. An NFL stadium and a Premier League ground are different objects, and calendars differ. Every team therefore receives two scores.
Intensity drives the per-sport tables. Each available measure is converted to a percentile within that sport (or, equivalently for the calculator, a within-sport z-score mapped to a 0–100 band). A full ground counts the same whether it sits in Melbourne or Milan. The Intensity score is the average of the within-sport scores across the pillars that have data.
Scale is reserved for signals that mean the same thing in every sport: social reach, Wikipedia page views, and MagicMarkets interest where a data-sharing agreement exists. These are compared directly across sports, not re-ranked inside one league.
The Following 50 blends the two at half Intensity and half Scale. That blend is a design choice, not a finding. Intensity lets a sold-out club with a fierce local base compete with a global giant. Scale stops a small but loyal club from topping the world on loyalty alone.
Scope
Clubs and franchises only. No national teams. National-team support mostly measures population and patriotism, and would swamp every table.
The first published per-sport drafts cover the NFL (all 32 teams) and the Premier League (the 20 clubs of the current season). Other leagues enter as sourced snapshots accumulate.
Sources and honesty rules
- No figure is printed without a dated public source.
- Never estimate or fill gaps. Prefer an unranked team to a guessed number.
- Sudden jumps in follower counts are flagged for human review; bought followers distort Reach.
- Method changes carry a dated note on this page. Tables cite the method version they used.
- MagicMarkets interest data requires a partner agreement. Until that exists, Interest is blank and marked as a known gap.
On the wire
Each table ships as a wire item with its own code, for example SW-FOL/NFL or SW-FOL/PL. A short note from the regional desk accompanies every team that moves. Appeals and WRITETHRU corrections are part of the product, not an afterthought.
Filed by the Analyst Desk.
Method version note — 19 October 2026
Until MagicMarkets trading volume is available under a data-sharing agreement, draft tables may use English Wikipedia page-view totals over a fixed 90-day window as a public Interest proxy. That choice is labelled on every affected row. Reach in the same drafts uses citable social-follower figures (Wikidata P8687) pending live platform snapshots. Both are subject to human check. When partner Interest data arrives, the proxy is retired with a dated note on this page.
Canonical source: docs/the-following/method.md · Figures in any table marked NEEDS HUMAN CHECK until the Analyst signs them off · WRITETHRU corrections only
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