The Big Lead

The Chargers Almost Doubled Twitter Followers Since L.A. Move, But 45% of Total Are Now Fake

By Ryan Phillips

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Since moving North last year, the Los Angeles Chargers have gained a ton of Twitter followers. When they left San Diego they were hovering below 500,000, but if you check now, they boast 805,000. Man, that’s a lot for a franchise to pick up in one year, right? There’s just one problem: a lot of the team’s Twitter followers are fake.

Eagle-eyed Twitter user Caleb Norman (CalebBMX89) isn’t the first to notice the crazy bump the Chargers got once they moved to LA, but he did do a TwitterAudit of the team’s followers. It wasn’t pretty:

We ran his numbers ourselves and they check out. Of the Chargers’ reportedly 805,000 followers, TwitterAudit claims 359,611 are fake. That’s roughly 55 percent that are real, just over half. When you consider the Chargers have well over 300,000 new followers since moving to LA and carry 359,611 fake followers, it leads to some questions.

So are Dean Spanos and his idiot sons buying Twitter followers to make it look like they have a huge following in their new city? I mean, we all know the Chargers have virtually no fans in LA given that they can’t find 27,000 of their own fans to fill StubHub Center. But would they really resort to buying followers? Well, yes. That would actually be fairly classic Spanos thinking.

You see, the Spanos family doesn’t do next-level planning. Remember how Bobby Fischer could see the chessboard five or six moves ahead? Think of whatever the opposite of that is and you’ll have Dean, John and A.G. Spanos. They make moves without thinking of the fallout.

They left San Diego for Los Angeles and couldn’t believe their former home hated them. They were told repeatedly they wouldn’t be welcomed in LA, then were shocked when they didn’t have any actual fans there. They put together a new logo the day they announced the move and didn’t bother to ask anyone if it looked ridiculous. They are absolutely the kind of people who would buy Twitter followers and not consider that anyone would look into it.

Do I know for a fact the Chargers are buying followers? No, of course not. But consider this: The Los Angeles Rams — you know, the team people actually wanted in LA — only have 733,000 followers. The Chargers, who no one wanted, are outpacing them by 52,000. That premise alone is ridiculous.