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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Football: transfers and fantasy

August 12, 2008

Never mind the Olympics, football websites remain the post popular sport sites in the UK, currently accounting for a third of visits to our Sports category. As you can see from the chart below, by last week traffic had already surpassed the mini summer peak caused by the European Championships. In fact, the category received more visits than at any point last season, and looks like it may soon surpass the highs of the 2006 World Cup / pre-season period.

UK Internet traffic to football soccer websites 2005 2006 2007 2008 chart.png

The cause of this sudden spike in traffic is the commencement of pre-season activity and all the foreign tours, friendlies and mini-tournaments this entails. Transfer activity is also a big contributor, and a summer full of rumours, press coverage, announcements and ambiguous agent / player statements has helped maintain traffic levels. We took a list of the all the major transfer targets this summer and whittled them down to the ten most searched for, which are charted below.

Top footbal transfer searches gareth barry ronaldo berbatov frank lanpard robbie keane david villa arshavin kaka deco peter crouch summer 2008 chart.png

Cristiano Ronaldo has hardly been off the back pages all summer, so it’s not surprising to see that he’s maintained the most consistent search performance over the last few months. Searches for both David Villa and Andrei Arshavin shot up following star performances at the Euros and the inevitable links with Premiership clubs that followed. However, searches for both the Russian and the Spaniard soon dropped off again once it become unlikely that they would be plying their trade in the England this season. There was a peak in searches for Peter Crouch when he transferred from Liverpool to Portsmouth, but it was Anfield new boy Robbie Keane who generated the most searches in a single week following his transfer from Spurs.

The start of the new season also means the now traditional surge in traffic to fantasy football sites. As the chart below illustrates, the official Premier League site, the Sun’s Dream Team and the Telegraph’s game are now firmly established as the leaders in this field.

UK Internet traffic to fantasy football sports sites premier league sun dream team telegraph 2005 2006 2007 2008 chart.png

The fantasy football market is very competitive, but I can see from our new search tool - which now includes paid and organic search rates at an industry level – that just 7.7% of search traffic to our Sports – Fantasy category (which is dominated by football) comes from paid search. However, looking at the top 10 search terms it is clear that the newspaper-branded ones, including ‘telegraph fantasy football’, ‘sun dream team’ and ‘dream team’ all have much higher paid rates than their generic counterparts. This is because a successful fantasy football game can drive a significant amount of traffic a newspaper’s site.

We’ll be monitoring the fantasy football market over next few weeks to see if they have the desired effect. Keep an eye on the blog and our new Twitter feed to for further coverage…