Real Madrid, Barcelona & More: World's Most Popular Sports Teams On Social Media

Real Madrid and Barcelona are the world’s most popular sports teams measured by social media followers, with each of the Spanish giants approaching 100million Facebook and Twitter fans combined. Madrid’s galaxy of stars including Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and James Rodriguez have helped them to attract almost 82m ‘fans’ on the world’s most popular social network, Facebook, plus almost 15m Twitter followers for a combined following of 96.75m across the two dominant social platforms.

Barcelona’s array of talent including Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez have helped to garner them slightly more Facebook fans than Real but a few fewer Twitter followers, hence second place overall.

Although those two big clubs are way ahead of any rivals, England’s Premier League is collectively the best represented in the world’s top 10 most popular clubs.

As our exclusive chart of the top 30 most popular teams shows - and Sportsmail looked at all sports sports teams across every nation, at club and international level - Premier League clubs fill five of the top 10 places.

Manchester United are at No 3 in the world, followed by Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool at No 4, No 5 and No 6, and Manchester City are at No 10. United are approaching 70m Facebook likes and Twitter followers combined, well clear of Chelsea (46m) in the slot behind them.

Football teams dominate the top 10 and indeed the top 30. The only non football team in the top 10 are the LA Lakers of NBA basketball at No 9.

Football teams fill 17 of the 30 slots, with four of those being the national teams of Mexico (in 15th place), Brazil (16th), Germany (28th) and England (30th). There are seven NBA teams in the top 30, three teams from the NFL in America, two from Major League Baseball and one Formula One team, Mercedes.