How many Gooners are "local"?
Location when supporting a football team is a contentious subject with different fans jostling for position for who is most 'real'. Many local supporters feel they are more akin to what they believe a true supporter is as they follow their local team whilst many others feel it is now a global game with global fans and location should not mean a thing.
Glory-hunting exists to a certain extent however due to Arsenal's long barren run it can be said that Arsenal probably have very few glory hunting followers. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or not because on one hand it shows a great deal of loyalty and passion for supporters with no historic link to a club to follow an unsuccessful team and then again to prove that loyalty Arsenal have had to be unsuccessful!
A handy infographic from SportsDirect shows the areas where most official shirts are sold in their stores and it has shone some light on where the majority of shirt buying fans live (or at the very least where they purchase their shirts in terms of retailer and location). For what it is worth we don't believe any supporter is more real or authenic than another based on location but it was an interesting enough read to share with you.
Unsurprisingly, Arsenal have the highest percentage of 'local' fans based on sales figures and all of our significant sales areas are what you could call 'domestic' (with the exception of Dublin but we're being loose with the term domestic and grouping these island nations together and it is worth considering these are SportsDirect sales figures). Sheffield is joint second with Dublin and Southend-On-Sea for shirt sales and what is interesting about that is our local rivals Tottenham have an official shop in Southend-On-Sea high street and Southend doesn't even figure on the Spurs infograph - perhaps they are buying all their shirts in the official shop when they buy their commemorative DVDs....
Also, a price-competitive retailer like Sports Direct in theory should do better in shirt sales in areas where the local team's fans are likely to be on lower wages (based on official figures) yet in Liverpool and Newcastle they sell better in areas quite a way away. Liverpool sell more Liverpool shirts in Sports Direct in Bristol than they do in Liverpool!
The most shocking statistic was 4.55% of Manchester United shirts being sold in Liverpool!! Another one worth mentioning is Chelsea's second best location for sales through Sports Direct is Lagos.
You can read the full stats here.
Ultimately this tells us nothing about where our fans live and work but do we really care? It's good to have a strong local fan base but we're a global club now and should be proud of that.
