The Other League Table.

A results table on its own is a scoreboard. The point of a study is interpretation: what the measured behaviour of 116 clubs, across 190,444 in-window posts and 977,683,366 public interactions, actually says about how football speaks to its supporters, and what anyone inside or outside the industry can usefully do with it. Four readings follow, each anchored to the numbers published above.

For the industry: budgets buy reach, they do not buy connection

The study’s clearest industry finding is that the social league table is not the money league table. Coventry City, with 1.7 million combined followers, rank first overall of 116 against clubs whose audiences are more than a hundred times that size. Bournemouth top the Premier League on the division’s smallest average gate. Two National League accounts out-publish every club in the country bar four. None of this is sentiment: it is what size-fair measurement shows when the measures are locked before anyone knows the answers.

The spread inside each division makes the same point from the other direction. Clubs in one division share broadly comparable income and infrastructure, yet the composite runs from 70.1 to 27.8 inside the Premier League alone. A gap that wide between organisations with similar resources is not a resourcing gap. It is process, priorities and craft, which means it is closable, and the clubs at the top of each table have already published the proof in public, every week, for anyone who looked.

What the data says about supporters

Supporter attention behaves consistently across all five tiers, and three patterns stand out. First, connection concentrates in smaller communities: a National League club earns roughly twice the interactions per post per 1,000 followers that a Premier League club does (0.95 against 0.47). Large accounts carry millions who watch from a distance; a small club’s following is dense with people who turn up, spend and reply. Normalised for size, the closest communities respond hardest.

Second, the minutes after full-time are treated as the week’s prime slot by the clubs themselves: 110 of the 112 clubs with a speed measure average under 45 minutes from final whistle to first post, 32 average under five, and the median across English football is under ten. An industry does not converge on a ten-minute standard by accident; it converges because that is when its audience is looking.

Third, format habits have shifted decisively. Native video is above 40% of output in every division and a majority of Premier League output, and winter deadline day still works as appointment viewing: 114 of the 116 clubs posted that Monday, and one day generated 18,451,518 public interactions. Football audiences have not drifted away from club media; they have concentrated on the formats and the moments that feel live.

What a club can take from it

• Speed is a process problem, not a spending problem. Clubs in every one of the five divisions average under five minutes from final whistle to first post, so the capability is not gated by budget. A decided running order, content prepared before kickoff and one person empowered to press publish at the whistle move a club from half an hour to five minutes.
• Judge the operation per thousand followers, not by follower count. Follower totals flatter big accounts and hide sleepy ones. Interactions per post per 1,000 followers is the internal number that tells a media team the truth, and it is the one this study weights highest.
• Video share is a decision. Within a single division it spans from a third of output to over two thirds, on broadly comparable resources. Where a club sits in that span is a choice about mix, not a fact about means.
• Presence is the cheapest point on the board. Nine clubs finished below five platforms out of five, most through dormant or missing accounts. An account that exists but stays silent reads as absent, to this study and to supporters.
• Benchmark against the division average line, then pick one measure. The methodology publishes every formula and the behaviour it measures is public, so any media team can re-run its own numbers at any time and see whether the line moved.

What a supporter can take from it

For supporters, the table is context rather than a stick. A low rank does not prove a club does not care: the study measures published output, not effort, and a two-person operation at full stretch can trail a rival with three times the hands while working twice as hard. What the table does show is where the club’s operation sits against its own division, on measures no club can buy its way up.

The division average lines set fair expectations: first post-match content arrives, on average, in about seven minutes in the Premier League and inside half an hour in every division, including the National League. And the connection measure is half made of supporters themselves: every reaction, reply and share in this dataset is fan behaviour, so engagement per 1,000 followers reads as a measure of the relationship, not of the media team alone. The most engaged communities in this study are not the largest ones, which is worth knowing about your own club before judging its numbers against a giant’s.

The study’s job ends at a fair mirror. The rankings are editorial and final, nothing about a position is for sale, and any club that wants better numbers knows exactly which behaviours the measures reward, because every formula, weight and counting rule was published before a single score existed. Summary data remains available to journalists and researchers on request.