Mohamed Salah has underlined his growing pedigree as Africa’s biggest Football star by winning both the Caf Africa Player of the year and the BBC Award but now also tops the Africa Digital Football Stars report released by German based research company, Result Sports.
Salah tops a list of 60 African Football Stars on social media with a digital community of 18, 107, 322 fans followed by Didier Drogba on 16, 306, 174 and Samuel Eto’O on 12, 871, 174.
The Liverpool Star has 7.6m fans on Facebook, 6.7m on Instagram and 3.7m on Twitter which gives him quite some reach and his fan base continues to grow.
Salah won the Africa Player of the year last Friday in Accra, Ghana pipping Liverpool team-mate, Sadio Mane and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang at a colourful ceremony at the Ghanaian capital and his acceptance speech was full of appreciation to his team-mates and his fans:
“Winning this award is a dream come true – 2017 was an unbelievable year for me I had a fantastic time with the national team,” said Salah after receiving the trophy.
“This is a big award for me, a special moment in my career. I would like to dedicate it to all the kids in Africa and Egypt.
“I want to tell them to never stop dreaming, never stop believing.”
The report takes into consideration three of the most popular social media platforms on the African continent, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as shown in the charts below.
Egyptian Football Legend, Mohammed Abou Trika surprisingly comes in at fourth with 11, 717, 497 fans
Borussia Dortmund and Gabon Star, Pierre- Emerick Aubameyang completes the top 5 with 7, 132, 216 fans.
Kevin-Prince Boateng, Mohammed E-Neny of Arsenal and Egypt, Ramadan Sobhi of Stoke City, Leicester and Algeria Star, Riyad mahrez and Eric Baily of Manchester United and Ivory Coast complete the top 10.
This is the first ever research into the size of the digital communities of Africa’s biggest Stars and this is a ground breaking report and it paints an interesting and surprising picture given the big name players from Africa.
Mario Leo, CEO of Result Sports explained why they have extended their global eporting benchmarks to Africa in an chat with supersport.com :
“We are very proud and honoured to release for the first time ever the African Digital Football Player Analysis.”
“ frican players add great values to football teams around the world and contribute with their skills to championships. “
“It was important for us to consider past legends and current stars to enable a holistic view to digital sports media status quo in Africa! “
“We want to continue to evolve the digital possibilities for African Sports with our From Africa For Africa Digital Initiative!”
One key take away from the top 60 is the dominance of Egyptian Players with 17 players, 4 of them in the top 10.
17 – Egypt
6 – Ghana , Morocco
5 – Ivory Coast, Algeria
4 – Senegal
3 – Nigeria, South Africa
2 – Cameroon, Congo DR, Tunisia
1 – Gabon, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia
©Emeka Enyadike/supersport.com
