Liverpool's fascinating figures and 48.2m surprise highlight valuable edge over rivals

When football clubs engage with potential commercial partners they have plenty to sell.

In the case of Liverpool, the storied history of the football club and its roots provide a compelling narrative, it is a club whose charm has long been the story and the journey as one of English football’s biggest clubs. The Reds’ status as European greats has also been long established, with six European Cups, the most recent title arriving in 2019, placing them among the continent’s football royalty.

The road now is to grow the club globally and make it a dominant force, something that the Reds are well on the way to achieving with the amount of major, blue-chip companies that are aligning themselves with the club a testament to its enduring strength. Deciphering the popularity of clubs and their reach can be difficult to do. Social media engagements provide some of the data to be able to fill in some of the blanks.

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Liverpool’s recent Carabao Cup final against Chelsea, where Virgil van Dijk’s 118th-minute header secured a remarkable triumph at Wembley for Jurgen Klopp’s men, provided a basis for research into just how much pull the club had on social media compared to this time last year, as well as how they fared against some of their rivals - all of whom are battling the Reds in the race to win the attention of new fans and grow their own brands.

According to data that the ECHO has seen, collated by Blinkfire Analytics, the Reds were the most searched term on Google in the UK on Carabao Cup final day, with more than one million, perhaps not unsurprising