Geelong vs. St Kilda supporters: who does more yoga?

With the AFL grand final this Saturday, there’s been a timely little poll release from Roy Morgan looking at the sporting and leisure behaviour of the supporters of the grand finalists.The estimates here derive from 12 months worth of Morgan data (July 2008 to June 2009) from their Roy Morgan Sports Monitor, which is a component of their Roy Morgan Single Source national surveys.

First up, Morgan collated an index of various sports and leisure activities undertaken by both Cats and Saints supporters and compared them to the national average. The index has been anchored so that a score of 100 is the national Australian average participation in each of these various activities. As a result, any score less than 100 is less than the national average while anything greater than 100 means that supporters of these clubs participate at a higher rate of than the national average.

The raw index from the rather eclectic selection of activities comes in like this.

But we can do something a bit more here. As a result of the way the index was calculated, we can measure the distance from the national average that each supporter base experiences for each sporting activity. The way to read it is a positive score is the percent more likely that a Saints or Cats supporter is to engage in a particular activity, compared to the national average. Conversely, a negative score is the percent less likely that a Saints or Cats supporter is to engage in a particular activity compared to the nati0nal average.

So we see that St Kilda supporters, for instance,  are 24% more likely to participate in dancing and 81% more likely to participate in horse riding than the national average, while being 54% less likely to participate in motor sports, and 39% less likely to participate in shooting than the national average.

Also something worth pondering – again using Morgan data – is the way the supporter base of each of these teams has changed over the period of 2001 through to 2009.

Geelong is having a very good year!

If we look at the change in supporter numbers for all clubs between 2001 and 2009 – it comes in like this:

The Dockers and the Cats have had the largest change in supporter numbers over the period, while the Bombers, North Melbourne and Carlton have had the largest reduction in their supporter numbers. Anyways, whoever you support – good luck!