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Traditional sports have seen declining participation at many levels, with football being no different. This is occurring at a time when emergent technologies present new challenges, particularly to the crucial yet ignored cohort of millennials. Without meeting the needs of millennials, football cannot be successful in the future. This research seeks to understand how millennial football fandom (sport, not team) in Australia impacts football participation, whilst empirically examining the impact of football video games (FVGs).

Survey data are collected from online groups, forums and social media pages of Australian football (soccer) fans. Quantitative analysis of millennial fandom and its influence on football participation (for the first time demarcated into play and engagement) is undertaken, including the moderating influence of time spent playing FVGs, amidst covariate influences of age and number of children.

Results highlight the multi-dimensionality of millennial football fandom in Australia, reveal the typical hours spent playing football across a range of participation types (including play and engagement), support fan involvement’s influence on engagement with football, establish that a desire to interact with other football fans manifests in playing more football, specify how playing FVGs moderates these relationships, supports the covariate influences of age and evidences that playing FVGs does not hamper football play.

This is the first study to examine millennial fans of football (the sport, not tied to a club) and the influence of fandom on football participation. By separating football participation into two forms, play and engagement, we highlight discrete influences, whilst evaluating for the first time the moderating influence of the time millennials spend playing FVGs. For sport managers and administrators, these are important findings to facilitate better segmentation, recruitment, retention and participation, each with broader societal health benefits. This is undertaken in Australia where football is not a dominant code, relegating fandom to a niche, thus revealing important findings for sports and business management.

This study delves into the psychological processes underlying sport fans' post-purchase innovativeness behaviour. This exploratory research aims to establish a theoretical framework that elucidates the formation of sport fans' word-of-mouth (WOM) behaviours, particularly emphasising the structural relationship between motivated consumer innovativeness and satisfaction in using AR live-streaming services.

Utilising an online survey and convenience sampling, the study garnered a total of 243 usable responses from three online baseball fan communities in South Korea. Confirmatory factor analysis was employed to assess the psychometric properties of the constructs. Subsequently, a structural equation model was used to probe the influence of motivated consumer innovativeness on WOM, with a particular focus on the mediating role of satisfaction.

Three dimensions of motivated sport fans innovativeness – functional, hedonic and cognitive – showed a positive association with WOM, partly mediated by satisfaction. In contrast, socially motivated sport fans innovativeness did not directly lead to WOM but influenced it solely through satisfaction. The full mediating role of satisfaction in the relationship between socially motivated fans innovativeness and WOM was found.

This research stands out as one of the scant studies exploring motivated sport fans innovativeness in the context of AR live sport streaming. The findings not only corroborate but also augment the extant literature by empirically confirming that three dimensions of motivated fans innovativeness, coupled with satisfaction, are pivotal antecedents to WOM intention.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of sports sponsorship on brand equity using two managerially related outcomes: price premium and market share.

This study uses a best–worst discrete choice experiment (BWDCE) and compares the outcome with that of the purchase intention scale, an established probabilistic measure of purchase intention. The total sample consists of 409 fans of three soccer teams sponsored by three different competing brands: Nike, Adidas and Puma.

With sports sponsorship, fans were willing to pay more for the sponsor’s product, with the sponsoring brand obtaining the highest market share. Prominent brands generally performed better than less prominent brands. The best–worst scaling method was also 35% more accurate in predicting brand choice than a purchase intention scale.

Future research could use the same method to study other types of sponsors, such as title sponsors or other product categories.

Sponsorship managers can use this methodology to assess the return on investment in sponsorship engagement.

Prior sponsorship studies on brand equity tend to ignore market share or fans’ willingness to pay a price premium for a sponsor’s goods and services. However, these two measures are crucial in assessing the effectiveness of sponsorship. This study demonstrates how to conduct such an assessment using the BWDCE method. It provides a clearer picture of sponsorship in terms of its economic value, which is more managerially useful.

This introduction provides the methodological framework for the book, approaching the business of football through the lens of its most reliable consumers – the fanbase. Fan cultures necessarily inform the normative understanding of a football club, due to the popularly held belief that it is the fan’s – or some reified idea of the fan – that is the permanent feature of a football club and that provides its identity. Players and owners come and go, but the relationship between the club and the fan is, theoretically, never-ending. In truth, this is never a real fan who could exist, but a constructed image of the fan built out of other narratives and that, at some level, football fans associate themselves. This fan is no one in particular, but is drawn from a close reading of football culture and identifying the directives of the traditional fan. Utilising a combination of critical theory and the existing literature on football club ownership, our goal is to reveal the distinction between how people talk about the social dimension of football clubs, and how they actually relate to their fans and the wider world in the era of late capitalism. A club is not simply the romanticised notions held by those within the games, but, as with all businesses, it is also the product of it conducts itself in a series of other networks of exchange. Often irreconcilable with the aforementioned romantic notions, these networks often get hidden by the prevailing discourse.

National surveys reveal that sports fans exhibit greater support for athletes, sports teams and leagues endorsing social justice initiatives compared to the general population, highlighting the potential of sports for positive social impact. This study investigates whether such responses are influenced by systematic biases.

Replicating a Nielsen national survey, two experiments explore whether biases affect support for athletes' participation in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The study also examines partisan motivated reasoning as a factor driving sports fans' support for BLM.

While avid fans display stronger endorsement of BLM compared to causal/non-sports fans, evidence suggests that systematic biases distort these responses. When sport identity becomes salient, reported support for the BLM movement becomes inflated.

Researchers often employ self-report surveys to gauge audience perceptions of athlete activism or cause-related initiatives, particularly when assessing their impact. This study's findings indicate that this context is susceptible to SDB.

The study underscores the role of systematic biases in self-report surveys, particularly in socially desirable contexts. People tend to over-report “positive behavior,” leading survey participants to respond more favorably to questions that are socially desirable. Therefore, interpreting survey results with caution becomes essential when the research context is deemed socially (un)desirable. It is crucial for researchers to apply appropriate measures to identify and mitigate systematic response biases. The authors recommend that researchers adopt both procedural and statistical remedies to detect and reduce social desirability biases.

Moving away from the stories of financial disaster we encountered in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 examines what it means for fans when their club is suddenly awash with more financial muscle than some nation-states due to the generosity of a wealthy benefactor who is seemingly more interested in sporting glory than in financial gain. This chapter engages with the notion of the football club as a billionaire’s plaything. Roman Abramovich’s acquisition of Chelsea in 2003 saw the West London club embark on an eye-watering spending spree and a sustained period of on-field successes, one that was unknown in the club’s history to that point. As a result, we take Chelsea during the Abramovich era as a starting point for considering how this model of ownership affects the relationship between fans and the connection that they have with their club. The evident success that financial muscle can bring shows owners what a happy fanbase is capable of, what they are capable of doing, and what they are capable of ignoring. The success of the financially doped teams of the 2000s created a precedent for winning over a fanbase with a successful football club, but nevertheless sat awkwardly with the normative ideals of how a football club should exist in the world and relate to its supporters.

This chapter builds upon the analysis of the last chapter, as fans have to deal with the issues that arise from their team’s financial superiority. Here, we question what happens when that financial superiority is accompanied by significant moral and ethical issues. Recent involvement of state actors in the ownership of English football has been evidencable and occasionally appears clear. Various reflexes and cognitive distancing occur from fandoms when football club ownership engages in practices that, according to the normative models that fans ascribe to their clubs, are mutually exclusive with the values of the fanbase and the club’s history. A common form of fan reflex often takes the form of distancing the players on the pitch from the club’s institutional structures, effectively teasing out the matchday experience from the structures that benefit from the raw emotion it generates. Another reflex is questioning why the fan should surrender their club when a morally, ethically problematic ownership model has acquired it. Here we have perhaps the greatest challenge to the normative model and, rather than negotiating that tension, as often as not the response is to try and ignore it.

Bringing together our analysis from the previous chapters allows us to lay out the various contradictions and issues surrounding ownership models that have arisen for fans of football clubs. Exactly when are most English football clubs supposed to have conformed to the normative model? Our analysis reveals that the context in which football clubs operate is that of global business and has developed in line with the practices of other businesses that exist outside the sporting arena. There is always going to be an uneasy tension between a fan ideal and something that has to operate within global contexts. However, in the modern game ideal and practice find themselves not merely in tension, but often completely in opposition to one another. Football finds itself in a position where something has to give, be it ownership models or the affective ties of the fans themselves. Fans can either continue to wrestle with the contradictions that arise from what they think their club is or fandom itself changes to embrace the context of the ownership. Given the moral injunction that is almost invariably built into the idealised image that fans have of their club, there is one question that we must always ask in the contemporary climate: How far is too far before all of this means nothing?

This chapter will develop an understanding of what the logical conclusion of having English football clubs primarily existing as businesses: namely, those instances where clubs are treated not as community institutions but as any other business with set assets that can be disposed of at a profit. There is an unfortunate history of clubs being owned based on the value of the assets they possess (such as their stadium or training), a trend that has only seemed to accelerate in recent decades. The various forms asset stripping takes can be explored by examining what happened to clubs like Blackpool FC and Wimbledon FC, as well as many others. This chapter is an exploration of what happens when the entity that fans assume is something more than a business is dismantled for profit, the harshest of reality checks, and a reminder that football clubs in these contexts are little more than business assets.

In recent years, the relationship between Manchester United fans and their club has been put under the spotlight due to the contentious relationship between the fanbase and the club’s American owners, the Glazer family. However, the commercialisation of Manchester United and their ramping up of their associated brand accelerated massively during the 1990s, as a result of the coincident timing of the country’s glamour club returning to dominance during a period of ever-greater financial returns for top-flight success. As the undoubted commercial trailblazers in English football (and the first English club to be listed on the Stock Exchange), analysing their development during the 1990s is, arguably, the best way of understanding how and why top-flight football clubs operate the way they do and, in a knock-on effect on the league’s competitiveness, why the clubs below them can so easily fall away.