Leeds United top the Premier League for digital technical performance, new research reveals

Leeds United have the strongest technical foundations of any club in the Premier League, according to new research from independent digital agency Mediaworks, despite the club finishing just tenth in the table last season.

The Premier League Digital Performance Index scored all 20 top flight clubs out of 500, looking at how easy each one is to find online, how much supporters trust and engage with them, and how well their websites and apps actually work.

Leeds recorded the best technical score of any club in the league, a measure of site speed and ease of use. It’s a result that puts the West Yorkshire club ahead of every Premier League rival on the metric that matters most for turning visitors into paying supporters, from ticket sales to shirt sales to app engagement on matchday.

Arsenal topped the overall index with a score of 442.2, ahead of Liverpool on 435.4, Manchester United on 403.5 and Manchester City on 379.9. Newcastle United posted a similarly strong technical score of 77.9, backing up the pattern that Leeds’ result points to: strong digital foundations don’t always show up in league position.

For Leeds, the finding suggests the platform is already doing its job. The bigger opportunity now lies in building the reach and authority needed for more supporters to discover what the club has already built, rather than fixing anything on the technical side.

The research also points to a clear financial link between digital performance and revenue. Every additional 10 points on the index is associated with roughly £22.5 million in extra annual revenue for a club, a correlation that puts a commercial value on the kind of digital groundwork Leeds has already laid. Clubs with higher scores also tend to have larger social media followings, with a strong correlation identified in the data, and a more moderate link was also found with performance on the pitch.

Phil Parker, Head of Marketing at Mediaworks, said, “Leeds have built something a lot of clubs haven’t: a website and app that actually work well for supporters. That’s not a small thing. Football clubs are run like media businesses now, and fans judge them the same way they judge any other brand, by how easy they are to find, trust and use. Leeds have solved the hardest part. The next step is making sure more people know it exists, because that’s where the commercial upside sits.”