The Impact of Social Media on Attendance in LaLiga

Research Question

We all know that social media marketing has become one of the most important channels in any business, especially in sports. But what tangible outcomes does it actually produce for the Spanish soccer league? For this project, I wanted to look at a few LaLiga teams' attendance numbers by game, and how they correlate with certain social media metrics.

Data Collection

First, I looked at the correlation between a team's average attendance and their follower count on Instagram. As you would expect, those have a pretty strong correlation with a score of 0.581. For context, a correlation score of 0 means no correlation, 0.3 means roughly weak positive correlation, 0.5 is a moderately positive correlation, and anything about 0.7 is a strong positive correlation. But this isn't very interesting. It makes sense that the bigger clubs will have more fans, therefore will have more fans come to their home games, and will also have more followers on Instagram. So, I wanted to dig a bit deeper. I chose four teams to record their attendance for each home game so far this season, as well as their total amount of likes on each Instagram post for 7 days leading up to said home game.

I would've liked to do this for each team to get a bigger dataset, but since this data is extremely specific, there's no other way for me to collect it besides manually recording the likes of each post in that timeframe and adding them up. So, in an attempt to get a relatively complete picture, I chose FC Barcelona and Real Madrid as the two biggest clubs in the league, Real Sociedad as a mid-level club, and Rayo Vallecano as a smaller club. And since I was looking at the attendance per game, I wanted to specifically look at Instagram likes within 7 days leading up to that game (ending the count when they posted a team sheet for that week's game).

Data Collection Insights

I learned a lot of what I set out to learn during the data collection phase. Above is the summary sheet of the Real Madrid data I collected. Even with a small sample size, there are some interesting takeaways. Like how the number of posts leading up to a matchday doesn't correlate with attendance, but the average number of likes each post gets does correlate with attendance (0.303 correlation score).

As I was collecting the data, I realized that some outside factors influenced the activity on social media leading up to the match. For the bigger clubs who are playing in European competitions (Champions League, Europa League, Conference League) in the middle of the week, there would be a lot more posts during the weeks they had a mid-week European match. As you can see here, the number of posts on Madrid's Instagram correlated strongly with whether or not they played in the Champions League that week (0.599). For the smaller clubs like Rayo Vallecano, I noticed a huge uptick in posts and likes when a big signing announcement was made. Finally, I recorded a binary variable for if their opponent that week is playing in European competition this year (meaning they finished in the top 6 last year, and therefore a a big club that people would like to see play). This had a strong positive correlation with all the clubs, even though it does not matter that much to social media.

Below are some bubble charts to help visualize this data for each club:

The bubble size represents the attendance number that week, the Y-axis is the average number of likes on each post, and the X-axis is the matchweek. The colored line parallel to the X-axis is 1 standard deviation above the average number of likes.

Key Takeaways

While this is a small sample size, I believe it paints an accurate picture of the whole league. My hypothesis that more social media engagement leading up to that week's match will correlate positively with attendance numbers. I would've loved to see the correlation with viewership numbers as well, but those do not seem to be readily available online. I would not say that increased social media engagement LEADS to more attendance, but I do believe that it contributes to it. The main reason we see this positive correlation is that social media engagement quantifies the fans' excitement for that weeks match. Real Madrid's week 11 match was the first El Classico of the 2024/2025 LaLiga season. So, the attendance was higher than usual, and so was the Instagram like count. And after Barcelona blew out Madrid at the Bernabeu, they received a huge amount of social media attention, and saw a huge turnout at their next home game because people we so excited about how the team was playing.

While it is quite obvious that the bigger a club's social media presence is, the better it is for marketing and attendance, I still believe this short study I did was useful. The front office of a club can look at recent social media metrics to predict attendance for any given game. It also proves the importance of promoting your team on social media. Doing collaborative posts with the LaLiga official account to reach a broader audience always led to more likes per post. Posting the club's most famous/newest player to connect with casual fans and ultras alike. All of these are important tactics to for a club's social media team to employ. As I said, social media is not the sole cause of attendance, but in this day and age, I proved that it does play a big role.

Proposed Further Research

When I have more time, I'd like to gather data on more clubs with more home games played, and I'd also like to compare the correlations with the other Big 4 leagues (English Premier League, Italian Serie A, and the German Bundesliga). I'd also like to look at advanced playstyle metrics and how that correlates with attendance across those leagues as well. I'm assuming teams with more progressive passes, more successful dribbles, touches in the opponent's penalty box, etc. will have more attendance, but I'd like to build a predictive model to prove it.