Football Causes Cancer

Supporting a football club is a lifetime commitment. Your team must come before everything and anyone else in your life, whether that be kids, partner or career. Your team's name must be the last words that you gasp with your dying breath.¹

One popular chant with football fans across the world is:

"I'm Arsenal (replace with the name of your own club) till I die."

Chris Cook of the BBC has decided to take this football song literally and explore just how long football fans in England and Wales have committed to support their local team. In Life expectancy: Which football fans are Premier League? Chris looks at the life expectancy of football fans for each team in England.

To work out the life expectancy of football fans Chris looked at the areas around the grounds of football clubs, calculating the life expectancy of the closest 100,000 men living in the vicinity of the stadium.

Kenneth Field has taken Chris's research and created a map showing how long fans of the various clubs in England and Wales can expect to live. Football till [they] die shows an interpolated surface of life expectancy in England and Wales. You can click on each of the club's markers on the map to view the life expectancy of fans, the club's ranking in the league of life expectancy, the percentage of obese fans and the percentage of the team's fans who are binge drinkers.

Footnotes

¹ Unless you support Chelsea of course. If you support Chelsea you are allowed to support the club only during periods of success and support other teams during the dry years.
² I used The Daily Mail research method to determine whether football causes cancer or not (N.B. I made it up).