The Greatest Football Fans Switch of All Time - Raises A Big Marketing Question

The Teams Or The Superstars - Which Does Football Fans Really Follow in This Digital Age?

[Story Adopted from CNN Report]

Sky Ouyang used to avidly follow Real Madrid, keeping up to date with how the La Liga club was doing from his Shanghai home.

A Real shirt from the 2008/09 season -- Cristiano Ronaldo's first campaign as a Real player -- was a prized possession. But then Ronaldo moved to Juventus and Ouyang's loyalties changed.

Focused flicked from Spain to Italy; to the back of the wardrobe went the Real shirt, in came Juventus merchandise, and immediately it was the Italian club the 23-year-old followed on every social media platform.

"I support Ronaldo first and foremost. The team isn't important, it's whoever he plays for," the social media executive, who first fell under the Portuguese's spell when Ronaldo was the young buck at Manchester United beguiling with step-overs and swerves.

Ouyang is not alone in switching his allegiances to Juventus following Ronaldo's $117m summer transfer from a club with whom he established himself as one of the greatest to have played the beautiful game.
Cristiano Ronaldo Juventus

With 139m Instagram followers, 74m on Twitter and over 122m on Facebook, Ronaldo is the most followed footballer on social media.

Juventus was the fastest growing European club online in China last month, the number of followers ballooning at a rate which has been described as unprecedented.

Perhaps it should be of no surprise that five-time Ballon d'Or winner Ronaldo, a footballer who has only one equal in Lionel Messi for comparable talent and fame, attracts such zealous following in a country where success and celebrity is cherished.

"There hasn't been an incident like this where there's been fans moving from one team to another or deciding to choose and follow a second team. This is probably the largest shift we've ever seen in China," says Tom Elsden, senior client manager at Shanghai-based digital marketing and investment company Mailman.

"In the same period, Real Madrid have lost followers so there's been a direct correlation between Juventus growing and Real Madrid losing followers."

But the tidal wave of followers which came Juventus' way once it signed one of the world's most famous sportsmen was not merely a Chinese phenomenon.

The Bianconeri has gained 3.5m Instagram followers over the last month, while Juventus' engagements, impressions and followers on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have also rocketed.

Does Ronaldo's digital influence, his power to change a fan's allegiance, mean the nature of football fandom has changed?

If Ronaldo, Neymar and Messi all have a bigger social media following than their clubs, is this the era where the sport's biggest names garner more devotion than the teams for whom they play?

Simon Chadwick, professor of sports enterprise at Salford University, says the cult of celebrity has changed the way football fans around the world associate with teams and players.

"There is the emergence of celebrity culture over the last 15 to 20 years in a way that didn't exist in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s," he tells CNN Sport.

"We're now more interested in celebrities than perhaps we are teams and that's a characteristic of not just football and sport but of life in general."


George Best
George Best is regarded as the first British sportsman to be accorded pop star status.

Star footballers have been hero-worshiped since the beginning of the 20th Century and for decades have attempted to capitalize on their popularity.

At the peak of his footballing powers in the 1960s, former Manchester United winger George Best -- a man once dubbed the fifth Beatle -- famously appeared in an advert in the United Kingdom telling viewers that Cookstown bangers were "the Best family sausages."

But much has changed since those black and white days when one of the world's most celebrated players helped increase sales in sausages for a family butcher.

Advertising campaigns are more sophisticated, footballers' brands are carefully cultivated, major clubs and their players are lucrative businesses and, crucially, there is the world wide web.

The internet, said Stephen Hawking, has connected us "like neurons in a giant brain" and has allowed players and clubs to communicate directly with fans, while in this globalized world almost everything is accessible, from live streaming a match to buying snazzy boots.

If, as renowned journalist Arthur Hopcraft once wrote, football reflects the kind of community that we are then the sport as it is today, and those who follow it, are a reflection of an interconnected world.