It follows a study of 3,000 football fans aged 15-69 in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany).
The UK has highest level of merchandise ownership, followed by Germany, France, Spain and Italy.
The highest spending market on club-related merchandise by far is the UK, where the average spend in the last 12 months was more than 180 euros – when extrapolated, it means that about 2.7 billion euros was spent in 2005.
Next is France with an average per fan of over 134 euros, but the number of French fans who spent money on football merchandise was less than half than those in the UK.
The next biggest market was Germany with euros 1.7billion euros.
Scarves and jerseys are most popular articles, with 35 per cent of fans, or 44 million, possessing either of these goods.
Next is T-shirts with over 40 million fans saying that they own one.
More than 37 million fans aged between 15-34 years own football merchandise. However, fans aged between 40 and 49 years are the highest spenders among European fans, having spent 142 euros on average in the last year on club-related merchandise.
Real Madrid and Juventus had the most popular merchandise across the five markets. Both had merchandise owned by more than eight million fans, although almost half of Real’s came from abroad, whereas three-quarters of Juventus’s came from its home market.
Next in popularity were Barcelona, AC Milan and then Manchester United.
The data is from SPORT+MARKT’s Football Monitor conducted in November 2005.
