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In 2017, the National Basketball Association (NBA) became the first major professional North American sport league to adopt jersey sponsorship. While professional leagues across the globe have allowed this practice for decades, the NBA's decision marked what may be the start of a new trend in North American sport sponsorship. With this in mind, the current study sought to assess the impact of fans' perceptions of these sponsorships on sponsor- and team-related outcomes.

An online sample of 301 NBA fans across the United States was conducted through Amazon's MTurk.

Results exhibited the importance of sponsorship authenticity, which maintained the strongest influence on sponsor- and team-related outcomes. Brand–team fit, sponsorship familiarity and sponsorship identification were also assessed, with mixed results for each factor.

Results of these findings related to sponsorship authenticity and consequent practical and theoretical implications are discussed, and areas for future research are provided.

Given its importance in the brand management of sport teams, the present research initiative primarily concerns the investigation of the formation process of sport team loyalty. By integrating a hierarchy of effects model into a relational perspective, the study aims to investigate the role of sport consumers' involvement, self-expression, trust and attachment with a sport team in building loyal relationships. A conceptual model is proposed and tested in the context of professional soccer teams.

The data of the study comes from 287 consumers of a South East European country. The fit of the model is tested using structural equation modeling and the statistical program LISREL.

The results confirm that: all the hypothesized constructs constitute either direct or indirect determinants of sport team loyalty; a hierarchy of effects approach, cognition-affect-conation, can explain how strong consumers-team relationships can be developed; and team attachment acts as a partial mediator in the relationship between the cognitive components of the model (team involvement, trust and self-expression) and team loyalty.

The findings provide several implications to marketing managers of sport teams in how to go about and develop loyal sport fans.

No previous investigation has integrated relationship marketing with a hierarchy of effects in order to explain loyalty to a sport team.

This study is one of the first efforts in sports marketing literature to assess sports fans' evaluation of brand extensions introduced by a professional sports team. Using measures of perceived fit between the parent brand and the extensions, it is hypothesised that increased fit will result in more positive fan evaluations and higher intention to purchase the team's extension. Results from correlation and regression analyses provide support for this hypothesis.

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to the extant sport marketing literature by positing fan engagement, team brand image and cumulative fan satisfaction with the team as factors influencing attitudinal and behavioural soccer (football) fan loyalty, with enduring involvement with the team as a moderator.

A convenience sample of Australian A-League soccer fans completed a paper-and-pencil, self-administered survey to evaluate their team on the focal constructs. A total of 207 participants were recruited from a major Australian east-coast university.

Using partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), the study found that fan engagement influences both team brand image and cumulative fan satisfaction, while team brand image also influences cumulative fan satisfaction, and both of these constructs influence attitudinal loyalty and behavioural loyalty. The moderating role of enduring involvement was also found for two relationships: team brand image → attitudinal loyalty and team brand image → behavioural loyalty, along with a mediating role of attitudinal loyalty.

This study increases our understanding of the reasons why soccer fans are committed to and exhibit fan-related behaviours for a team, thus contributing to the sports-marketing literature on the relationships amongst fan engagement, team brand image, cumulative fan satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty and behavioural loyalty, along with the moderating role of enduring involvement. The findings also assist sports-marketing practitioners to formulate more effective, fan-centric marketing-communication strategies leading to a larger loyal fan base.

The purpose of the study is to develop a reliable measure of sport team personality that incorporates the relevant dimensions/traits consumers attribute to their sport teams.

Initially, content analysis of sport teams' web sites and magazines were used to identify the items of the scale. Following this a survey research method was used to gather data from consumers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on a sample of 301 consumers.

The analyses of the data resulted in a sport team personality scale consisting of five dimensions: competitiveness, prestige, morality, authenticity, and credibility

Sport brand managers can use the scale for benchmarking purposes and for examining how their sport teams/brands are perceived by sport consumers in terms of the five dimensions identified in this research.

The study expands the concept of brand personality to sport services and provides insights into the main dimensions of sport brands' personality. This is the first study that develops a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the personality of sport teams.

Sport teams not only compete with other teams for the ultimate prize but also for a share of customer mind space. For winning fan loyalty and resultant economic success, management of sport teams need to focus on team-branding, and thus, developing and measuring a team’s brand equity becomes essential, which is the core purpose of this paper.

Current work builds upon previous efforts to develop a reliable and, more importantly, a parsimonious sport team brand-equity (STBE) index, as opposed to the usual multi-dimensional reflective scales, too complicated and not of much use to practitioners.

The authors propose that the STBE index having eight indicators is enough to capture the full domain of the concept and provide a snapshot about the ability of a team’s administration to create strong emotional bonds with its fans.

Apart from demographics of the respondents, an important drawback is that the STBE index is from the perspective of television or online viewers and not those watching live in stadiums. This work contributes to extant sports brand equity literature by proposing a simpler scale made of casual variables, as opposed to reflective scales running into large number of similar items, a first of its kind in this domain. The authors also are able to forward the growing call for developing more of such scales through this effort.

Not only can the present scale be easily used by sport-marketers and researchers, it will be especially useful for marketing managers who want to associate their brands with sport teams, as it affects performance of their own brand.

The work represents a novel effort for developing a team-based brand equity and, to the authors’ knowledge, has not been attempted in this literature before.

This study investigated the potential negative effects of a sponsored team's losing performance on audiences' trust and purchase intention toward the sponsoring brand. Shedding light on the moderating role of sponsoring brand familiarity among audiences and audience team identification regarding such negative effects, the study establishes when sports sponsorship may incur risk to a sponsoring brand.

Three experimental designs (audience as stimulus of a team's losing vs control condition) were used to indicate whether and when losing performance influences participants' trust and purchase intention toward the sponsoring brand.

The participants in the losing condition report lower brand trust and purchase intention. Brand trust mediates the relationship between losing results and decreased purchase intention. The negative effects of losing on brand trust and purchase intention only appear when the sponsoring brand has low familiarity among audiences and only for audiences with low identification.

The strategy of a brand with low familiarity sponsoring a team that frequently loses has risks and is not worth advocating. However, if an unknown brand has already sponsored a team that often loses, the efforts to cultivate audiences' identification with the team can reduce the potential risks.

The affirmed negative effects of losing performance on brand trust and purchase intention have value for firm sponsorship decisions. This study contributes to the sponsorship literature by revealing two boundary conditions (sponsoring brand familiarity and audiences' team identification) for those negative effects.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the catalyzing factors team managers of previously successful European football clubs could capitalize on in order to build or rebuild the brand identity of their respective team via the Europa League.

The authors followed a case analysis method. The authors selected teams that have had a history of good performance in European competitions in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, before falling off the radar. A total of 19 teams, representing 15 countries, accepted the invitation.

The managers underlined eight major catalyzing factors. The managers specifically emphasize the importance of branding and how it can crystallize the promise these teams articulate to their fans, on and off the football pitch. Moreover, the values that a team encapsulates and communicates through its daily actions seem to represent the essence of the brand.

One risk relates to the respondents who could very well know what a brand is and how a brand should be managed in theory, but it does not necessarily mean that they know how to do it at all.

The paper highlighted the importance of shrewd management, especially when resources are scarce. A competition such as the Europa League might provide some room to maneuver but, above all, the organization must deliver the brand promise to its fans.

This is one of the first studies looking at the leverage a European football competition could provide to previously successful clubs.

The purpose of this paper is to test the psychometric properties of the Team Brand Personality Scale by Blank et al. (2013, 2018) in the context of the professional football clubs in Greece, based on the perceptions of fans for their own team and the rival team. The brand personality team scores of the fans are also used to create a league map presenting the brand personality of the different teams of the Greek football Super League.

Following a quantitative research design, 724 Greek football fans completed an electronic questionnaire assessing demographics, brand personality, team identification, sport involvement, attitudinal loyalty and game attractiveness.

The results partially confirmed the psychometric properties of the brand personality scale and suggested that the notion of brand personality influences positively the attitudinal loyalty and game attractiveness of the fans. Based on the results, the personality structure for the football league was also created and discussed.

This study was set to focus only on the brand personality perceptions of the highly identified fans of football teams, known in the literature as realized brand personality. However, a thorough understanding of the particular concept requires also the perspective of sport marketers who may perceive the brand personality in a different manner (i.e. intended brand personality), so as to build a holistic picture of brand personality of football teams.

This research confirms that football teams have already projected a unique personality among their highly identified fans which can be used by marketing practitioners while designing integrated communication strategies.

This paper contributes to the broad brand personality literature by replicating Blank’s et al.’s sport team personality scale to the Greek context and the league level, involving both supporting fans and rivals.

Social media has promoted anti-brand communities, which build around the shared aversion to a specific brand. The purpose of this paper is to investigate social media-based anti-brand communities and their effects on the sports team brand in question.

The authors conducted a netnographic study of Facebook-based anti-brand communities that oppose a professional football team.

The netnographic study reveals characteristics and drivers of Facebook-based anti-brand communities that oppose a professional football team. The research further identifies co-destructive behaviours of anti-brand community members that harm the sports team brand and even its sponsors. However, the findings also reveal that anti-brand communities may play a positive role in sport, as they strengthen the relationship between fans of the opposed brand and this brand and foster rivalry among football fans.

This research establishes the relevance of social media-based anti-brand communities for sports brands. Recommendations are made for team sport brands with regards to how to deal with the phenomenon of anti-brand communities.

While the previous research on anti-brand activism focused on either offline movements or movements using traditional websites, this research is the first to investigate the pivotal role of social networking sites for anti-brand activism. The paper further uncovers unique motivational, attitudinal, and behavioral patterns of fans that meet in communities opposing not only the rival team, but also the brand associated with the team. Findings show ways to better understand and deal with such anti-brand communities in sports.