Red Card 2015 is a preview to the annual Mailman ‘China Digital Champions League’ report that looks at the performance of Europe’s top clubs within the country. The agency has taken a look at the clubs outside of the top 15, almost the Europa League of digital performance.

The focus of the study was to gauge how successfully clubs with a lower online presence in China (less than 1 million Weibo followers) were engaging with football fans through digital media.

The main areas that points were allocated for were;

• Followers – across official Sina and Tencent Weibo platforms
• Presence – awarded for online presence outside of Sina and Tencent Weibo
• Engagement
• Buzz

This gave a final score that was then put into a table, with the top 15 outside of those who will be in the main Mailman report that will be released early next year. The final standings look like this;

The biggest movers were the German teams, helped by the success of the national team during the World Cup has led to a new interest in their league and teams in the months since. Aston Villa are another success story, despite not being internationally renowned they launched in November 2013  and have developed an impressive following and active fan base over a relatively short period. The next step, Mailman Group suggests, would be to develop a Chinese language website to build upon this success.

There is also a look at what is new in China, with Weishi – China’s equivalent to Twitter’s Vine – making an appearance and one which both Liverpool FC and Tottenham Hotspur have launched a presence on. Others include Tmall.com, an e-commerce store which Arsenal launched on this year, and Stickers were big after Barcelona FC created a set of 16 in partnership with Tencent available to fans to download on WeChat.

It was also revealed that Liverpool FC have the greatest engagement around match day, ahead Manchester City and Chelsea. At their peak, over 12k LFC fans were interacting with the Weibo account, on average boasting more than 4x the engagement of Chelsea or Arsenal.

To download the full Christmas report, you can do so at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31016882/Post%20Images/Red_Card_China_Christmas_Special.pdf