A report crossed our desk this week that we haven't stopped thinking about: the Hyperset Index — The English Football Pyramid Digital Directory, Season 2026/27 (powered by Alkhemy, an LLM visibility and intelligence platform for sport). It does something deceptively simple: for every club from the EFL Championship down to the National League, it adds up digital engagement volume — search demand, website traffic, YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers — and lays the whole pyramid out side by side.
Card on the table, as always: we build a fan engagement platform, so a dataset about the gap between digital audiences and real fans is catnip for us. Every number below comes from the Index's charts (which means the figures are approximate — we're reading bars and scatter plots, not a spreadsheet), and the interpretation is ours, not Hyperset's.
Here's what jumped out.
1. The pyramid's digital shape is not its sporting shape
The Index opens with a treemap of the whole pyramid sized by digital engagement, and it's disorienting in the best way. The biggest single block in League 1 — Leicester City — is larger than most of the Championship. West Ham United's Championship block dwarfs everything around it. Relegation moves a club down the sporting pyramid; its digital audience doesn't follow the fixture list down with it.
Within the Championship alone, the spread is staggering: West Ham sit at roughly 8.8 million in combined digital volume, Wolves near 5.9 million, while Lincoln City close the division at around 300,000. That's a ~30x gap inside one league. Two clubs will kick off against each other on the same Saturday with a thirty-fold difference in the audience theoretically watching from the internet.
The obvious reading is "big clubs are big." The more useful reading: digital gravity is an inheritance. It was built in Premier League seasons, European runs and cup finals — and it keeps paying attention long after the results stop justifying it. The question is whether anyone converts that attention into something the club owns.
2. Look closer at the bars: most of that volume is rented
The Championship breakdown chart splits each club's volume into search, website, YouTube and Instagram — and for the biggest clubs, the bar is overwhelmingly Instagram followers. West Ham's ~8.8M is mostly purple; so is Wolves'.
We've written before about why this matters: a follower is an audience you rent from a platform, at an algorithm's pleasure. Organic reach on social media typically lands somewhere in the low single digits, which means a club "reaching" millions is, on any given post, actually reaching a rounding error of them — and can't reliably reach a specific one of them, ever.
The smaller, quieter segments of those bars — search demand and website traffic — are arguably worth more per head. Those are people actively coming to the club, on the club's own turf, leaving first-party signals. Which brings us to the most interesting chart in the report.
3. The 20-to-1 town: matchday reality vs. website reality
For League 1, the Index plots average gate attendance against average monthly UK website traffic. Read the outliers:
- Sheffield Wednesday: ~23,000 average attendance, ~450,000 monthly UK website visits — roughly 20 website visits for every seat filled.
- Plymouth Argyle: ~16,000 attendance, ~300,000 visits — about 19:1, punching far above their gate.
- Leicester City: ~29,000 attendance, ~300,000 visits — "only" 10:1, but from the division's biggest base.
- At the other end, Burton Albion: ~4,000 attendance and ~25,000 visits.
Sit with that Sheffield Wednesday number for a second. The matchday crowd — the fans the club can see, count and sell to — is outnumbered twenty to one by people voluntarily visiting the club's own website every month. That's not a "reach" problem; the reach already exists, on owned property. It's a conversion problem: almost none of those visitors leave a name, a location, a consent, or any way to be reached again. They knock on the front door, and the door doesn't have a handle.
4. Down the pyramid, engagement concentrates hard
The National League chart shows each club's share of the division's total global engagement: Carlisle United take 12% on their own, Southend 9%, Scunthorpe 8%, Forest Green 7%. Four clubs capture over a third of the entire league's digital attention; at the bottom, clubs like Hornchurch register around 1%.
Even at step five of the pyramid, digital attention is winner-take-most — and the winners are, again, mostly clubs with EFL history. For everyone else, the lesson isn't "post more." A club holding 2% of its league's attention will not out-content Carlisle. It can, however, know every one of its fans by name — because at that scale, a few thousand engaged, identified supporters is a bigger commercial asset than a diffuse audience ten times the size.
What we'd do with this data (disclosure: it's what we build)
The Hyperset Index is, in effect, a map of latent audiences — attention that exists but isn't owned. Three takeaways survive contact with any budget size:
- Treat reach as a lead list, not an asset. Followers and site visitors are prospects. The asset is a named, reachable, consented fan — with a location, a history, and a channel the algorithm can't tax. (Our longer argument: fan engagement for professional clubs.)
- Start the conversion where the ratio is best: your own website. A 20:1 web-to-gate ratio is thousands of warm fans per month already on club property. Give them one thing to do — a prediction, a quiz, a survey, a check-in — and they stop being traffic.
- Count participation, not impressions. Sponsors have stopped paying for "audience." The clubs that will out-earn their table position are the ones that can show who did what, where — which is precisely the data a follower count can't produce. (Related: how to get sponsors for a sports club.)
The pyramid's digital directory shows where the attention is. Who turns attention into fans is still completely up for grabs — and, refreshingly, it's the one competition where Leicester's parachute doesn't help them.
Source: *Hyperset Index — The English Football Pyramid Digital Directory, Season 2026/27*, powered by Alkhemy ("the LLM visibility & intelligence platform for modern sport") — by Stefan Wojciechowski. The Index covers the EFL Championship, League 1, League 2 and the National League; engagement volume combines search totals, website traffic, YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers. All figures quoted above are approximate readings from the report's published charts, and all interpretation is ours.
