Sky Ouyang used to avidly go after Real Madrid, keeping up to date with how the La Liga club was doing from his Shanghai residence.
A Real shirt from the 2008/09 season -- Cristiano Ronaldo's first campaign as a Real player -- was a prized possession. But then Ronaldo moved to Juventus and Ouyang's loyalties modified.
Focused flicked from Spain to Italy; to the back of the wardrobe went the Real shirt, in came Juventus merchandise, and automatically it was the Italian club the 23-year-old followed on every social media platform.
"I support Ronaldo first and foremost. The team isn't essential, it's whoever he plays for," the social media executive, who first dropped under the Portuguese's spell when Ronaldo was the youthful buck at Manchester United beguiling with step-overs and swerves, says CNN Sport.
Ouyang is not alone in switching his allegiances to Juventus going after Ronaldo's $117m summer transfer from a club with whom he established himself as one of the most impressive to have played the beautiful game.
Juventus was the fastest growing European club online in China last month, the amount of followers ballooning at a rate which has been explicated as unprecedented.
Perhaps it should be of no astonishment that five-time Ballon d'Or champ Ronaldo, a footballer who has only one equal in Lionel Messi for comparable talent and reputation, attracts such zealous going after in a country where success and famous person is cherished.
"There hasn't been an incident like this where there's been fans moving from one team to another or choosing to select and go after a second team. This is possibly the biggest shift we've ever seen in China," mentions Tom Elsden, senior buyer manager at Shanghai-based digital promotion and investment firm Mailman.
"In the same period, Real Madrid have lost followers so there's been an instantaneous correlation between Juventus growing and Real Madrid losing followers."
But the tidal wave of followers which came Juventus' way once it signed one of the world's most famous sportsmen wasn't merely a Chinese phenomenon.
The Bianconeri has obtained 3.5m Instagram followers through the last month, while Juventus' engagements, impressions and followers on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have additionally rocketed.
Does Ronaldo's digital influence, his power to change a fan's allegiance, mean the nature of football fandom has changed?
If Ronaldo, Neymar and Messi all have a greater social media going after than their clubs, is this the era where the sport's largest names garner more devotion than the teams for whom they play?
Simon Chadwick, professor of sports enterprise at Salford University, mentions the cult of famous person has modified the way football fans around the globe associate with teams and players.
"There is the emergence of famous person culture through the last 15 to 20 years in a manner that did not exist in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s," he says CNN Sport.
"We're now more interested in personalities than maybe we are teams and that's a attribute of not just football and sport but of life in common."
Star footballers have been hero-worshiped since the commencing of the 20th Century and for decades have tried to capitalize on their popularity.
At the peak of his footballing powers in the 1960s, former Manchester United winger George absolute -- a man once dubbed the fifth Beatle -- famously appeared in an ad in the United Kingdom telling viewers that Cookstown bangers were
But much has modified since those black and white days when one of the world's most celebrated players helped expand sales in sausages for a family butcher.
Advertising campaigns are more complicated, footballers' brands are carefully cultivated, radical clubs and their players are lucrative businesses and, crucially, there is the world broad web.
The internet, mentioned Stephen Hawking, has in contact us "like neurons in a giant brain" and has authorized players and clubs to communicate completely with fans, while in this globalized world almost everything is accessible, from live streaming a match to purchasing snazzy boots.
If, as famend journalist Arthur Hopcraft once wrote, football reflects the form of community that we are then the sport as it is today, and those who go after it, are a reflection of an interconnected world.
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