5 Great Australian Online Sports Communities

by Danielle Schwerin December 09, 2016

So what are some of Australia’s biggest sports communities? We’ve gone through and picked out some of the biggest and best in the nation. While social media plays a large part in the generation of online communities in Australia, forums and sporting websites have had a large impact in building amazing engaging sporting communities in Australia.

BigFooty

This one might surprise you, but it’s hard to find a bigger, more engaged online community in Australia. Founded in 1999, BigFooty’s numbers are staggering – 1 million forum discussions, 46 million posts and over 90,000 members. With thousands of discussions on general AFL, as well as separate forums for each AFL team, BigFooty caters to anyone with an interest in AFL. Don’t be fooled by the name however, BigFooty doesn’t just stick to AFL, it also incorporates one of Australia’s biggest cricket discussion boards, and also includes discussions on almost every sport imaginable in Australia and abroad, think NRL, A-League domestically and the NBA and NFL internationally. Whether you’re interested in chatting to like-minded sports fans, or want the latest news on what’s happening at your club, be sure to check out BigFooty.

The Roar

Founded in 2007 by Brothers Zac and Zolton Zavos, with head editor Patrick Effeney, The Roar is another community that sets itself from the pack and is one of Australia’s leading sports communities. What makes The Roar unique? It combines expert columnists with fan generated sports articles. Each month they publish around 1,000 fan articles to The Roar website, and capture somewhere in the vicinity of 80,000+ comments and more than 1 million visitors. Those are big numbers for a sports community! Fancy yourself as a sports writer? No matter what sport you follow The Roar is where you want to be with articles ranging from the biggest sports in Australia such as Rugby, AFL and Cricket, to A-League, US Sports and Motor Racing.

The Australian Cricket Team

Australia has a love affair with sport. It’s no different with our international teams, none more so than the Australian Cricket Team. On social media alone their community numbers are massive: 8 million on across two Facebook pages, 724k on Twitter, 460k on Instagram. Wow! When you consider that Australia has a population of 23 million, it’s telling us that 1 in 3 Aussies have a direct interest in the national cricket team. Whether you are an armchair critic, or a cricket fanatic who pulls a sickie to attend test matches, the Australian cricket team has certainly captured the nation’s interest.

Qantas Wallabies & Caltex Socceroos

Australia’s passion for international sport online doesn’t end with cricket, with the Wallabies and Socceroos coming in 2nd and 3rd in terms of national interest. While their numbers pale in comparison to the national cricket team, they hold a massive international audience in games primarily played overseas. With just over a 1 million community members each worldwide across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the Wallabies and Socceroos capture the imagination of a massive audience worldwide.

The battle of the codes

We’ve listed the biggest and most engaged forum in Australia, the biggest fan written sports community and the largest communities for international sports teams, but what about the domestic Football leagues – who wins that battle?

In terms of national leagues, it’s pretty tight with the NRL taking the cake over the AFL with a community of around 120k supporters (2.1m vs 1.9m) across the major social media channels of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

What about the individual teams, who comes in first in the battle of the codes? In pure numbers once again the NRL wins out with the one town team of the Brisbane Broncos on top of the podium with almost 900K supporters across its social media channels. Collingwood tops the AFL teams with almost 600K supporters their accounts.

 

So there you have it, Australia’s biggest and engaging communities online. Whether you are a sport enthusiast or just like an occasional check of the scores, these communities are the biggest and the best in the land.

Tell us what your favourite community is in the comments below.

 

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