The battle for the top spot in the Premier League of Facebook fan pages looks to be won before the season has really got going. With over 18 million fans, Manchester United are sitting clear at the top. The next closest rival is Arsenal with a respectable 7.3 million fans.

At this early stage, Chelsea and Liverpool are in with a shot for second place with a respectable 6.9 million and 6.85 million fans respectively.

The bottom position is currently occupied by Sunderland with just 28,000 fans.

But which team’s fan page is showing the fastest growth? In the two weeks since the season started, Manchester City have increased their fan base by 3%, the fastest growing of all the teams. But will it stay this way? Last week Stoke City were the fastest growing fan page, we’ll check in again in two weeks to see how the table stands.

A note on the data: Using BirdSong, we monitor the growth and activity of each Premier League Football team since the start of the 2011/2012 seasons (12th August 2011.) The monitoring covers the the 12 teams that have created and promoted (through their official website) an official team fan page.