Top 10 Most Popular Players in the NFL in 2024
Determining the most popular NFL football players in the world in 2024 was a challenging task, but we combined data from social media and surveys of real people to find out!
Read on to discover the top 10 most famous NFL players as of late August 2024, just before the start of the new football season.
Top 10 Most Popular Football Players in the World in 2024
Very few people will be surprised that Patrick Mahomes is the most popular football player in the world, closely followed by Odell Beckham Jr. But how did we reach that conclusion?
Unlike the richest NFL owners ranked by net worth, no single metric could be used to decide who’s the most popular football player in the world. That’s why we combined three different factors to decide: YouGov data, X, and Instagram.
Before we explain our methodology, let’s check them one by one.
10 Most Popular Football Players by YouGov Rating
- Patrick Mahomes – 50% popularity (KC Chiefs)
- Travis Kelce – 47% popularity (KC Chiefs)
- Joe Flacco – 39% popularity (Indianapolis Colts)
- Lamar Jackson – 39% popularity (Baltimore Ravens)
- Aaron Rodgers – 38% popularity (NY Jets)
- Odell Beckham Jr. – 38% popularity (Miami Dolphins)
- Russell Wilson – 37% popularity (Pittsburgh Steelers)
- Brock Purdy – 36% popularity (San Francisco 49ers)
- Matthew Stafford – 35% popularity (LA Rams)
- Kirk Cousins – 35% popularity (Atlanta Falcons)
This is our first data point, and it’s entirely based on YouGov.com data. The site conducts polls to determine the results. Feel free to read their metholody if you want to learn more.
Patrick Mahomes is leading the way here, closely followed by Travis Kelce. We suspect the latter’s popularity exploded after he started dating Taylor Swift. The best NFL betting sites even offer various Kelce – Swift prop bets, so his fame should keep growing as long as the power couple stays intact.
It becomes really close after the top 2, with the next eight contenders gathered in the 35-39% region. With such slim margins, we should see many changes during the 2024-25 season.
Top 10 Most Popular NFL Football Players on X (Formerly Twitter)
- Russell Wilson @dangerusswilson (Pittsburgh Steelers) – 5.5M
- Aaron Rodgers @aaronrodgers12 (NY Jets) – 4.5M
- Odell Beckham Jr. @obj (Miami Dolphins) – 4.3M
- Patrick Mahomes @patrickmahomes (KC Chiefs) – 2.6M
- Ezekiel Elliott @ezekielelliott (Dallas Cowboys) – 2.1M
- Dak Prescott @dak (Dallas Cowboys) – 1.4M
- Travis Kelce @killatrav (Kansas City Chiefs) – 1.4M
- Deshaun Watson @deshaunwatson (Cleveland Browns) – 1.3M
- Lamar Jackson @lj_era8 (Baltimore Ravens) – 1.2M
- Tyrann Mathieu @mathieu_era (New Orleans Saints) – 1.2M
You can instantly see some huge differences between the real-world polls and X! The most popular football players on that platform are Russell Wilson, Aaron Rodgers, and Odell Beckham Jr.
They are in a league of their own as the only NFL players with more than 4 million followers. Mahomes is fourth on this list, but the gap to third is huge. What about the other social media platform we used?
Top 10 Most Followed NFL Players on Instagram
- Odell Beckham Jr. @obj (Miami Dolphins) – 17.6M
- Travis Kelce @killatrav (KC Chiefs) – 6.8M
- Patrick Mahomes @patrickmahomes (KC Chiefs) – 6.7M
- Russell Wilson @dangerusswilson (Pittsburgh Steelers) – 5.6M
- Joe Burrow @joeyb_9 (Cincinnati Bengals) – 4.1M
- Lamar Jackson @new_era8 (Baltimore Ravens) – 3.5M
- JuJu Smith-Schuster @juju (Kansas City Chiefs) – 3.1M
- Tyreek Hill @cheetah (Miami Dolphins) – 2.6M
- Christian McCaffrey @christianmccaffrey (San Francisco 49ers) – 2.6M
- Ezekiel Elliott @ezekielelliott (Dallas Cowboys) – 2.6M
Odell Beckham Jr. is the NFL player with the most Instagram followers, and it’s not even close! Over 17.5 million people follow his account, with Travis Kelce (6.8 million) and Patrick Mahomes (6.7 million) right behind him.
These two seem to be around the top of all rankings, which explains their strong performance overall. It’s a shame they get below-average NFL salaries after tax, but we’re sure they don’t have financial issues! Especially if you compare Mahomes’ salary to NFL personnel.
How We Picked the Most Popular NFL Players: Methodology
We combined the following three factors when working on our football player popularity rankings:
- YouGov Football Popularity Rankings: YouGov.com conducts various polls among real people, asking them about different celebrities: whether they know them, their opinion on them, and so on. We took their popularity ratings as one of the data points for rankings.
- X (formerly known as Twitter) Followers: the number of followers on X is a good sign of popularity, so that was another data point we used.
- Instagram Followers: we also use Instagram followers, another huge social media platform that can serve as a strong indicator of fame.
Our goal was to combine the polls with social media popularity for the best results, which is why we used these three data points.
Since we wanted a balanced outcome, we gave the following weighting to each data point:
| Data Point | Weighting |
|---|---|
| YouGov | 50% |
| 25% | |
| 25% |
Since YouGov is our only source when people were pro-actively asked questions, we gave it the same importance as Twitter and IG followers combined.
Of course, the data from each source comes in a different format, so we included a normalization process to make sure we can compare the data points properly. We added a min-max normalization for each category, using the following formula:
Normalized value = (Value – Min Value)/(Max Value – Min Value)
As a result, we got a result between 0 and 1 for each platform. We applied the weighting described above, and this is how we got the results of the top 10 most popular players in the NFL.
Now that you know how we measured the final rankings, let’s look at each platform separately.
Important: YouGov’s polling data for this post was collected in Q2 of 2024, while the X and IG followers were collected by our team in late August 2024, just before the start of the 2024-25 NFL season.
What Are Your Favorite NFL Players?
What are the NFL players you like the most? After the top 100 controversy this year, this is definitely a hot topic in the football world.
Feel free to share your thoughts with us on the Sport Geek’s Instagram, X account, or Tik Tok! We also invite you to join our special Beat the Geek free NFL contest, which features an NFL trip for two, a MacBook Pro, and many other prizes for the winners.
