What Does a Football Audience Actually Look Like  Not in the Stands, but in the Data?

Red C Media, in partnership with Azira, has conducted Turkey’s first comprehensive stadium audience intelligence study for the Süper Lig 2025/26 season. Using Azira’s Pinnacle platform — geofence-based location intelligence covering all 19 top-flight stadiums — the study analyzed 306 league matches, tracking daily visit counts, common evening locations, and demographic signals across the full campaign.

The result is a dataset that reveals not just how many people attend matches, but where they come from, how far they travel, and which stadiums share overlapping audiences.

Scale of the Study

Across the 2025/26 season, an estimated 1.89 million unique fans attended Süper Lig matches, generating a cumulative matchday attendance of approximately 4.37 million. The study covered all 306 league fixtures across 19 stadiums, providing a complete season-long picture of matchday audience behavior in Turkish football.

Who Travels Farthest?

The study used Common Evening Location (CEL) data — the location where each individual is most frequently observed between 8 PM and 6 AM — to estimate how far fans travel to reach the stadium. Distances were calculated from CEL to stadium, with the top 5% of outliers trimmed to produce robust median estimates.

Samsunspor emerged as the standout for long-distance fan travel. Only 10% of observed Samsunspor matchday visitors are local, while 38% travel more than 80 km — the highest far-travel ratio in the league. This pattern reflects a classic Black Sea diaspora: a geographically distributed fanbase that makes significant journeys to support their club.

Beşiktaş followed with 33% of fans arriving from beyond 80 km, while Ç. Rizespor (22%) and Trabzonspor (21%) rounded out the top four — consistent with the passionate away followings historically associated with Black Sea and Istanbul clubs.

Fenerbahçe, despite the second-largest average attendance (35,581), showed a far more local profile: just 6% of fans traveled from beyond 80 km. Galatasaray sat at 12%, reflecting Rams Park’s position in the city’s northern suburbs and the club’s deep Istanbul roots.

Loyalty: Who Comes Back?

Loyalty was measured as average visits per unique fan across the season. Konyaspor led the league at 3.2 visits per person, followed closely by Göztepe and Gençlerbirliği (both 3.1). F. Karagümrük and Trabzonspor both registered 3.0 — suggesting compact, dedicated fanbases that return match after match.

At the other end of the spectrum, Kocaelispor and Antalyaspor recorded 1.8 visits per person — still indicating a core returning audience, but with a larger share of one-time visitors.

Stadium Explorers: Cross-Visitation Patterns

One of the study’s most distinctive findings concerns cross-visitation — individuals observed at multiple stadiums during the season. These are not necessarily fans of multiple clubs; they are best understood as football enthusiasts who attend matches at more than one venue.

The strongest cross-visitation corridor runs between Tüpraş Stadium (Beşiktaş) and Ülker Stadium (Fenerbahçe), with an estimated 3,428 individuals visiting both venues during the season. The Beşiktaş–Galatasaray pair follows at approximately 2,420, and Fenerbahçe–Galatasaray at 2,285.

In total, an estimated 13,648 individuals visited two or more stadiums over the course of the season — stadium explorers whose movement patterns reveal the tightly connected nature of Istanbul’s football geography.

International Origins

Fans from 84 countries outside Turkey were detected at Süper Lig stadiums. The United States (15.2%) and Germany (13.1%) led the international sample, followed by South Korea (10.6%), the United Kingdom (5.4%), and France (4.6%).

Beşiktaş drew the highest international share at 5.9% of its total matchday audience, followed by Trabzonspor (5.0%) and Samsunspor (4.0%). These figures likely reflect a combination of tourism patterns and diaspora connections to specific clubs and regions.

The Highest-Attended Matches

Galatasaray vs Beşiktaş (October 4, 2025) topped the season at an estimated 51,641 — the only fixture to break the 50,000 barrier. Galatasaray dominated the top of the attendance table, appearing in 7 of the 10 highest-attended matches. The Fenerbahçe–Galatasaray derby drew an estimated 44,170 in Kadıköy.

Methodology

All data was collected via the Azira Pinnacle location intelligence platform. Geofences were set tight to each stadium’s physical footprint. Common Evening Location (CEL) analysis was used to determine estimated residence locations. Distance metrics use a trimmed-median method (top 5% removed). Cross-visitation and loyalty metrics are based on unique profile matching across the full season.

Prepared by Red C Media for Azira — May 2026