The Jupiler Pro League is the most important football competition in Belgium. It brings together talents like Simon Mignolet, Emmanuel Bonaventure and even Mbaye Diagne. Not a single team from any major Belgian city is missing. Among them are FC Bruges, KV Mechelen, Royal Antwerp, Gent, Mouscron and Anderlecht. By looking at these teams, and more specifically their supporters, you quickly realize that they are not necessarily where you expect.
When we think of FC Bruges, logically we imagine that the supporters are all inhabitants of the beautiful city of Bruges. This is not always the case - very often the reality is completely different. Using Twitter, we were able to take a closer look at each team’s subscriber profile to determine their country of origin, and the result is surprising. We were able to see that 24% of Genk's supporters were not even in Europe, but in Africa – more specifically in Tanzania. Moreover, 68% of followers of FC Bruges are also on the African continent, in South Africa to be precise.
The Jupiler Pro League is followed religiously by football fans around the world, and social networks play a very important role in how the competition is perceived.
To try to determine which club has the most diverse audience, we used a Twitter API to find users who follow the official publications of Jupiler Pro League clubs.
Subsequently, we used the information concerning the geographic position of each subscriber and analyzed it using a geocoder in order to discover where each subscriber was based.
The data was then integrated into the heat map, in which the size of the hot spot varies depending on the number of followers from the designated country.
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