Forbes magazine has declared that the Green Bay Packers have the best fans in the NFL. Considering that this is the fan base that basically treated Brett Favre as if he cheated on all their mothers with Ragnar the Viking, this isn’t surprising.
Forbes used research conducted by Nielsen Scarborough to reach their findings. The study found that only 16 percent of people living within the Green Bay area were not Packer fans, the lowest percentage of the surrounding metro areas of all teams in the league. The rest of the top five were the Denver Broncos, New Orleans Saints, New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens.
The study used the following criteria in their rankings:
The Forbes rankings were based on the hometown crowd reach, social media reach based on the area’s population and three years’ worth of Nielsen television ratings, stadium capacity percentage and merchandise sales via NFLShop.com.
So, let’s just say the fact that the Green Bay area is the smallest market AND the fact that they’re the only game in town (and they’re good right now) probably helped their cause in the rankings. After all, not many people are going to move to Green Bay and dilute the fan base like more populous areas in the US. If anything, Packers fans are likely to leave the Green Bay area and spread their fandom like a cheddar-scented plague. The Green Bay metro area currently has a population of 306,241 people. In comparison, the Packers have 4.4 million Facebook fans and 701,000 Twitter followers.
