#ogae

A week leading to the final show of the 2024 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, let's look at the results of three major fan polls: OGAE, INFE, and Eurojury. Now, there are numerous polls held all over the internet throughout the season, but I consider these three the most "reliable" due to them not allowing voting for one's own home country. OGAE and INFE are long-running fanclubs, whereas the Eurojury vote consists of professional musicians from member countries and an online vote.

On the table below, I have compiled the final results according to each poll.

Every Fan Of Eurovision Is A True Fan Of Eurovision

What does it mean to be a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest? As ‘Eurovision Fever’ builds in the United Kingdom ahead of Liverpool’s hosting of the Song Contest, more people are talking about the Contest, their love for the Contest, and how excited they are to get tickets when they decided to try and get into the Liverpool Arena. It’s wonderful to see so many joining the community. But there’s…

Good morning, folks, and welcome to today’s statistical map - it’s about something with which I must admit to having a rather dubious relationship, even when it produces a winner I can get behind: the OGAE fanpoll results. The OGAE, if anyone has somehow, somehow not heard of it despite the constant drip-drop of its results over the weeks leading up to Eurovision every year, is the biggest association of Eurovision fans, whose vote is often talked up to be a foreshadowing of what the actual ESC results might be.

The way I see it, it’s not quite an accurate mirror even to our fandom, let alone to the tastes of the millions of people who tune in to watch the world’s biggest live non-sporting event. It reflects the taste of a small group of hardcore fans - only around 3.5k voted in this year’s poll, and in some countries, as little as a dozen or fewer voted - whose tastes are often biased towards uptempo, especially schlagerish efforts, and who look almost entirely to Western and Central Europe for potential winners. In the past 10 years, 25 of their 30 poll podium places have gone to “culturally” Western European countries, and only on a few occasions have they acknowledged Eastern Europe and post-1993 joining Central European countries, whose nations often end up with very few points if any at all indeed.

The OGAE’s poll coïncided with the actual winner last year, which has lent it a bit more gravitas in the fan media, but we must not forget that it was the first time that happened since 2013, although none of the poll’s winners in the intermediate period had found themselves falling as far from the mark as the likes of previous OGAE winners but ESC flops such as What about my dreams and Hero. Even last year, one of the poll’s podium winners, Monsters, ended up coming second from last in the final.

That being said, I am always interested in statistics and making maps, and it was fun to delve into the OGAE poll results. The geographical split - Italy taking mostly northern countries, Netherlands eastern and Switzerland central - is quite curious, as is the fact that all but one of the countries that didn’t opt for one of the OGAE’s eventual top 3 are located close to each other in Northern Europe. Estonia and Latvia looked left and right respectively to neighbours Sweden and Russia; Finland and the UK were enchanted by Norway; and in a vote that conspicuously snubbed not only the top 3 but also the countries immediately beneath it in the poll, Russia opted for Iceland and a number of countries that had accrued few points.

Mapping out the results, we see an almost complete wipeout of the Balkans, the Baltics and central Europe and a top 5 entirely comprised of countries who joined ESC before 1993. Luckily for the numerous countries left on nul point, more than half of the songs the OGAE leaves on zero not only avoid that fate at the contest but also accrue enough to qualify.