Guest Post:  Aaron Syed Jaffery (@aaronjaffery) is Managing Partner of NineteenEightyFour, a digital consultancy for brands in sport and entertainment.

In light of the Football League’s new partnership with YouTube, we thought we’d take a closer look at how clubs in the English Premier League fare on the global-video platform.

Often when social media league tables are banded about, the focus is on Facebook and Twitter. This is probably because of their primary function to communicate daily with their followers, but video is growing in importance in all industries – not just sport.

YouTube is after all, the world’s second biggest search engine. And video has much higher engagement than the written word. So, what did we find out?

Chelsea top the YouTube league

Chelsea are far and away the most prolific users of YouTube, with the most subscribers and the most number of videos uploaded. Manchester City have the most number of views, and are also very active on the platform.  Content for both of these channels is varied. The content that gains the most engagement tends to be funny outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage. However, higher-quality content such as player diaries and exclusive interviews also pull in the viewers.

Top 3 are a league apart

Almost predictably for the Premier League, those at the top of the league are a country-mile ahead of their competitors. Chelsea (260k), Manchester City (195k) and Liverpool (173k) boast subscribers in the hundred’s of thousands, whilst Tottenham Hotspur (48k) bridges the gap between the ‘big-boys’ and the clubs with more modest followings.

No Tube for Arsenal and Manchester United

As it stands, two of the biggest global clubs in the Premier League have no official YouTube channel. Arsenal and Manchester United are joined by Stoke City and Sunderland in the NoTube section of our visual.

Our suspicion is that Manchester United may be looking at how they best use the channel before launching an official page. The others may be taking the same approach, but they are certainly late to the party.

Size isn’t everything

Despite this, Crystal Palace must feel very proud of their fantastic engagement stats – only 52 videos, but amassing over 6,000,000 views. It appears that their cheerleaders, the Crystal Palace Crystals, are in no small way responsible for this amazing stat. Their take on Carly Rae Jepson’s song ‘Call me baby’, Gangnam Style dancing and Haarlem Shake account for over 3,000,000 views alone.

Best is yet to come

So all in all a mixed bag. With the increasing importance of video and new platforms such as Vine, we believe that the best is yet to come from the Premier League on YouTube.  Two of the biggest clubs are yet to enter the fray, and there’s still a lot of learning being done by those with smaller followings to understand what connects best with their fanbase.

Aston Villa have recently tied-up a deal with online video specialists Base79 to manage and optimise their YouTube channel.  This is likely to be the first of a number of partnerships over the coming months as YouTube becomes a greater focus for clubs.

What do you think…  Is YouTube going to be the new focus for clubs going into 2014?