When the big matches are being played, mobile page views go up, the Mediacells Leadership in Mobile initiative can reveal.

The mobile market insight company analysed over 20 million football-themed page impressions from the UK's top mobile sports sites including Sky Sports, 24-7 Football and CNN Football to highlight spikes in usage. For example, when Arsenal played Liverpool in the Barclays Premiership on April 5, 2008, there is a surge in usage, with peaks on this day from 1pm - 3pm, roughly after kick-off at the Emirates Stadium.

Out of nearly 15,000,000 footie-focused page impressions, nearly 70% of them occur on the days when there is big match action and those days are Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday and it's not a surprise that the peak times strike between 3pm – 5pm and 7.30pm to 9.30pm.

When it comes to pulling power, it's the Premiership games which give the European championship games a drubbing. When home giants Man Utd, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal played on the same day on Saturday March 15 the page impressions for this day exceeded 3,000,000 across the sites analysed.

"It's brilliant news for English football and it shows how engaged the British football fan is with his phone for doing stuff other than talking and texting. The challenge will be to see how ad sales outfits can capitalise on mobile engagement in Euro 2008 when there are no home nations in it," comments Brad Rees, CEO of Mediacells. 

Nokia is the hero manufacturer for sports fans with over 50% of the total sports pages accessed and the number one sports fans device is the Nokia N95, estimated to be in at least 2.5 million Brits hands. Sony Ericsson are a not-very-close second with just 14% of page share.