Mobile data usage at Munich Game:Brady beats Bayern

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What a spectacular game! Tens of thousands of American football Football fans came to Munich last weekend to watch the first regular season game of the US Professional Football League in Germany. A look at the mobile data from the O₂ Telefónica network shows: Fans came from all over Germany and many from the United States. According to the data, they are significantly younger and more digitally active than those who attend soccer matches. Players, sports reporters and fans alike were impressed by the electrifying atmosphere in the Munich Arena. Whether it was a selfie in front of the stadium, the impressive pre-game show, or the entire stadium singing "Country Roads" - the visitors to the "Munich Game" on Sunday streamed and posted this special experience intensively. At around 4,250 gigabytes, the use of mobile data in the arena and its surroundings on the O₂ Telefónica network on the day of the game clearly exceeded the data traffic during a regular Bundesliga soccer match with around 2,000 to 2,500 gigabytes of data.

The peak value in pure upload data volume from 3:00 - 4:00 p.m. CET is remarkable. In this hour, just under 280 GB of data was uploaded, which means many pictures and videos from the game were sent to social media and messenger services. That corresponds to around 10,000 minutes of streaming in HD quality. That is significantly more than at the last soccer matches, when the peak values were around 200 GB in each case. In total, i.e. in upload and download, the data volume in this hour was around 600 GB, which is also significantly higher than that of a soccer match, where around 400 to 500 GB of data are used per hour. With around 47 million mobile lines (incl. M2M - as of September 30, 2022), O₂ Telefónica is Germany's largest mobile communications provider.

The data in detail

Fans from all over Germany in the arena - every tenth visitor came from the USA

A deeper look at the mobile communications data together with the Austrian start-up Invenium Data Insights also shows that almost a quarter of the visitors came from abroad - above all a good 7,000 football fans from the United States. Those who came from within Germany came from all over the country, i.e. all 16 German states. According to the data, football fan strongholds include Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover and Cologne. Comparing the data with the Munich Oktoberfest shows that the Bavarian folk festival tends to attract people from its own state - football, on the other hand, "draws" people from all over Germany. It is striking that the soccer fans were significantly younger than the visitors to a soccer match. The largest group was made up of fans between the ages of 30 and 39 (40%). The second largest age group was visitors between 18 and 29 (23.3%), followed by those aged 40-49 (18%) and 50-59 (13.5%). The comparison with the Bundesliga match Bayern vs. Mainz on 29.10 shows: Soccer fans were predominantly distributed among the 40-59 age group. Similar to soccer, the "Munich Game" in American soccer was also dominated by men (72.4%). When evaluating information for statistical analyses, we only use data that is anonymized and aggregated. It is not possible to draw any conclusions about personal information.