The statistic date shows that Man United and Man City have over 8million followers each on Weibo and both clubs have more followers on the Chinese website than Twitter.

Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao are the third most followed club and Barcelona are fourth, but Real Madrid are down in 18th place. It is worth mentioning that, five Premier League clubs feature in the top 12 on Weibo.

In Twitter’s place is a microblogging site called Weibo which has an incredible 27.2m Premier League fans – just one million short of the total number of Premier League fans on the whole of Twitter worldwide.

So, do Chinese fans follow the same patterns at the rest of the world?

Well it is a story of one city in China, with the Manchester clubs accumulating 17,193,721 followers. United have 8,872,812 Weibo followers compared with 4,870,000 on Twitter, while City have 8,320,909 compared with just 2,420,000.