Football (soccer) is, by a distance, the most popular sport in the world, reaching hundreds of millions of people right across the planet. This presents an opportunity for teams, leagues and events to grow and monetise their fanbase. It also makes the game a magnet for all sorts of brands looking to tap into the “football fan” audience, especially during events such as the FIFA World Cup, which reaches 58% of all fans (and 42% of the entire population).

But we obviously can’t treat this as a single homogenous group, where everyone engages with football in the same way. To build an effective strategy for engaging football fans, we need to break them down into more distinct segments and understand their different attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.

This report takes a look at the global football audience broken down by age group, to reveal some of the differences (and similarities) among fans across the generations.

I’ve used data from the powerful Global Web Index and GWI Sport platforms, containing data from over 900,000 respondents across 48 global markets.

Obviously age group is only one (fairly crude) way of segmenting an audience, and a report like this can only ever scratch the surface. If you’d like to discuss digging deeper into the data to uncover bespoke insights into how your audience interacts with sport, using that as the foundation for an engagement strategy, please get in touch with eddie@overdog-marketing.co.uk.