• New Follow Player feature lets fans track their favourite footballers with real-time notifications

• Cristiano Ronaldo is most-followed globally of 590,000 players

• Expansion planned for basketball and hockey

Flashscore, the world’s most popular live scores app, has released its Follow Player functionality, allowing users to get real-time updates on their favourite football stars.

After phenomenal demand among its 100 million-plus monthly users, Flashscore has added what it calls its “flagship app enhancement of 2025”.

Fans can add up to 100 favourite players to receive updates and notifications in the same way they do with teams. Notifications include information whether the player appears in the starting lineup, goals, substitutions, red cards and post-match player rating. Notifications including assists, yellow cards, missed penalties and transfers will be released in a forthcoming update, along with players from other sports including basketball and hockey.

Flashscore has also expanded the array of statistics available to fans to include player-focused data points, including expected goals (xG), passing accuracy and duels won.

Cristiano Ronaldo is fans’ favourite

Flashscore’s database includes almost 590,000 players and 350,000 users have already selected at least one player to follow in the past month. Users follow an average of six players – meaning about 2 million favourites in the first month.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular player globally is Cristiano Ronaldo, with the Portugal forward ahead of Argentina’s Lionel Messi. Spain and Barcelona teenager Lamine Yamal is third on the list, ahead of France and Real Madrid forward Kylian Mbappe. Jude Bellingham is the most-followed England player in 10th place on the list, behind the likes of Neymar, Vinicius Jr and Robert Lewandowski.

Among UK users, the top four most popular players are the same, with Liverpool’s Mo Salah in fifth and Chelsea’s Cole Palmer in sixth. New Liverpool signing Alexander Isak is seventh, ahead of Chelsea’s Joao Pedro in eighth and Liverpool’s Florian Wirtz in ninth.

Flashscore is announcing the Follow Player feature ahead of tonight’s Legends Charity Game between Portugal Legends and World Legends in Lisbon. Flashscore is the official strategic partner of the match, which will feature former players, including Luis Figo, Kaka and Carles Puyol. Flashscore will provide users with real-time updates from the match, provided by Opta data from Stats Perform.

The match at Sporting’s Estádio José Alvalade has been organised by Sport Global with the aim of raising €1m for charities and serves as a spectacular curtain-raiser for the SBC Summit iGaming conference.

Tomáš Pondělík, Chief Product Officer at Flashscore, said: “This is our flagship app enhancement of the year. Fandom is evolving and we’re seeing a significant shift from fans following only their favourite teams to a deeper interest in individual players. Our community has been asking for this feature for some time but we wanted to launch it at the right moment, when we had the strongest player data on the market and a clear understanding of what fans expect. That’s why we focused on delivering fast, non-intrusive notifications during live matches, without cluttering their feed.

“We also know fans crave real insights, so we’re already working on adding more meaningful player data – from pre-match previews and live statistics to post-match ratings – giving them a richer understanding of performance. With Follow Player, fans can finally track their football heroes in real time, and this is just the beginning. We’ll be expanding to basketball and hockey later this year, alongside more notification types and new ways to explore upcoming fixtures.”