Cape Town - Mohammed 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.
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.
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.
"We are very proud and honoured to release for the first time ever the African Digital Football Player Analysis," Mario Leo, CEO of Result Sports explained why to supersport.com website.
"African 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."
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.
One key takeaway 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
NOTE: Siphiwe Tshabalala is the lone South African in 58th position
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