In theory you would expect a correlation between popularity of a football club, and media coverage but this doesn't seem to work in the case of Man Utd. I have observed that support for Man Utd has significantly declined over the last decade and yet media coverage of Man Utd seems to have increased.
I asked Google Gemini to graph football shirts sold by Premier League club, and here it is. Sadly it doesn't provide the source for this data.
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I would judge this to be a good metric for the level of support of Premier League clubs. The only outliers for me are Chelsea and Arsenal. I see far more Arsenal shirts than I do Chelsea.
When I watched Man Utd's tour games in the US, many of them were poorly attended. If I walk around Manchester, it's very obvious that support for Man Utd has fallen significantly yet it seems that commercial media organisations are covering Man Utd more than ever before. In my opinion, the reason for this is that if Man Utd support has declined, hate for Man Utd has been maintained. All the best supported clubs in England hate United. Even fans of locally supported clubs like Leeds or Newcastle hate Utd. As far as commercial media organisations are concerned, all they want are downloads and comments. They monitor the metrics very closely.
I know I read articles about Man Utd because I don't like them and when I look at the comments to Man Utd articles on the BBC, it is full of comments written by Man Utd haters.
If it bothers you that the BBC Football is covered with Man Utd articles, try not to read the articles and do not comment. Reads and comments are what drives these articles.