Thirty-five million U.S. Facebook users have “liked” the page of at least one of the NFL’s 32 teams. Combine that with location data and you’ve got, as Facebook says, “one of the most comprehensive samples of sports fanship ever collected.”
Facebook used the data to determine which team was the most popular in every county in the country. Here’s how it looks, mapped:
Unsurprisingly, most counties devoted to given team are concentrated in that team’s region of the country. The fanbases of few teams, though, are apparently not as bound by geography. The Dallas Cowboys are often referred to “America’s team,” and the data do indicate that the team’s fanbase covers an impressively large area of the country, stretching from Virginia to California, and pro-Cowboy counties appear in nearly every region. The Pittsburgh Steelers fan footprint is also fairly large and dispersed. Tim Tebow’s New York Jets, meanwhile, are the most popular team in only one county on Long Island.
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