Recently the Kansas City Chiefs fan base was ranked as one of the worst in the league. Is the criteria being used a fair way to evaluate a fan base?
Have you ever read or heard something and immediately knew that it was wrong? That was the feeling that many fans of the Kansas City Chiefs felt when Yahoo! Sports released an article about Michael Lewis’s NFL Fandom Report for 2019.
In this report, Lewis attempts to rank the NFL fan bases based off of three different factors. The first is what he calls Fan Equity, meaning people that are buying their favorite teams gear such as jerseys and other merchandise.
The second is what Lewis calls Social Equity, or how large of a following a team has on social media and how engaged those fans are.
The last measurement that he uses is Road Equity. Basically, how many fans show up to support their team during road games. Looking at the hard numbers that he has been able to put together and reading through the article, I can see how he comes to his points.
Where I began to question his logic is when I saw how high the Los Angeles Chargers were ranked on the list. The Chargers are not even ranked in the bottom five. Instead, they came out at 26th while Kansas City was ranked 31st. Now, even casual NFL viewers can tell you that the Chargers never have fans in their stadium, especially ever since they moved from San Diego. More often than not, there are more fans from the opposing team than there are local fans.
Also, this study does not seem to take into account how Arrowhead is the league’s loudest stadium. The same could be said when Seattle started a mini-earthquake during Marshawn Lynch’s famous “Beastquake” run. This study also does not take into account teams like the Chargers or the Los Angeles Rams that have recently moved. It will take time for the new cities to adopt their respective teams.
While Lewis’s study may be good for making a business deal, it in no way measures a fan base as a whole. Looking at the list, most of the larger market teams sit atop the rankings. Any fan could tell you that larger market teams are going to make more overall money, or have more social media interaction.
It would be interesting to see the study encompass more than just a few statistics and see where fan bases should actually be ranked.