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Insights into how fan experience can be used to cultivate football (soccer) fan loyalty are limited. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) paradigm, this study develops and tests a theoretical model investigating the effects of football-game socialisation, team interest, football interest and transaction satisfaction (stimuli) on fanship and cumulative satisfaction (organism), and subsequently, attitudinal loyalty and behavioural loyalty (response). National culture was a moderator.

A self-administered online survey collected data from a convenience sample of 762 football fans from Brazil, China and Germany.

The PLS-SEM results support the S-O-R based model, indicating that football fan-loyalty behaviours are determined by fanship and cumulative satisfaction with the team. Fan experiences, in turn, are also found to be influenced by fan perceptions relating to socialisation, team interest, football interest and transaction satisfaction—elements over which the football team's management may exert some degree of control. Some national cultural differences were found, with three of the model's 12 structural paths significantly different for Germany vis-à-vis Brazil.

This study advances the authors’ understanding of the significance of socialisation and fan-interest factors for football, providing evidence supporting the role of the fan experience and service-consumption stimuli related to those game experiences as significant drivers (stimuli) of the fan's affective (fanship) and cognitive states (cumulative satisfaction). This study enriches the limited body of evidence on fanship's role as a driver of attitudinal and behavioural loyalty. Finally, the multi-country study partially supports the moderation effect of national culture.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to explore children’s relationships with football teams and players and the influences on these.

A child-centric (Banister and Booth, 2005) inductive qualitative approach was utilised to capture children’s voices. The children were asked to take photographs around the theme of “football in my life” and these served as interview prompts when talking to friendship pairs.

Football played a central role in children’s lives in terms of interest, activity and consumption. The children articulated a portfolio of team (club) and player connections of varying strength. This contrasts with the existing adult fandom literature which focuses on individuals supporting a single team. Another strong theme emerging from the data was the children’s market-centred relationships with football clubs. Children’s connections were shaped by a complex web of influences including family and family history, friends, media and geography.

Existing fan literature has an adult focus which does not appear to fully explain the child fan. This research provides impetus for developing new theory that better captures child fandom. The findings reinforce the idea that football plays an important part in children’s lives and in doing so they establish their own meanings. The findings presented in this paper provide important insights into the lives of children that could be reflected on in the design of policy across a number of areas including education.

This paper presents the first child-centred football fan study.

Guided by the resource-based theory, the purpose of this study was to predict the role of football talent in the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) rankings of the men’s national football teams in the Copa America zone.

The study used archival data of Copa American national football teams. The dependent variable was FIFA rankings, and the independent variables were football talent (measured by the stocks of amateur footballers, professional footballers and football officials). Statistical analysis was performed using Kendall tau statistic and binary logistic regression.

The binary logistic regression results indicated that FIFA rankings were statistically and significantly associated with the stock of football officials and professional footballers – but not amateur footballers. The predictive model explained 80 per cent of the variance.

The study focused exclusively on the stock of football talent in each nation, and not alternative determinants of national football team competitiveness as economic power and quality of professional football leagues, among others.

The stocks of professional footballers and football officials are valuable sources of competitive advantage (CA) in national football team rankings.

The study highlighted the uniqueness and distinctiveness of a nation possessing large stocks of professional footballers which can boost the CA and rankings of Copa American national football teams.

Focusing primarily on Italian and European football, the research performs extended analyses at both the club and federation levels, compares between financial and sport achievements, and identifies correlations and discrepancies between the two. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The paper studies managerial systems and strategic directions across clubs and countries and links them to financial and sport performance. The research is primarily secondary-data and literature review based and uses multiple sources to ensure validity and reliability of the findings.

Solutions to the diachronic problems of football cannot be addressed through isolated actions, nor by isolated clubs, or even federations; but through systemic changes that affect, at club and federation levels: the organisational structure; the financial control mechanisms; and the very social essence of football.

The research is limited by its very secondary-data-based nature. Subject-specific primary data are thus necessary to empirically test the preliminary findings and propositions of this research.

The paper escapes the conventional “sports/financial performance” analyses to support a new perspective that examines the core product of football and identifies, comprehends and prescribes the various values offered by football to its various stakeholders and vice versa.

The purpose of this study is to offer a “brand equity model” that will help football organizations to manage their appeal.

The proposed model utilizes structural equation modelling analysis to test the hypothesized marketing brand equity (MBE) model. The empirical part of the research stems from a large survey of 1,300 Israeli football fans.

As expected, knowledge about the team, the team’s image and its perceived personality significantly predicted positive attitudes toward the team. This in turn predicted commitment, which predicted recommendation, which predicted intentions. The linear regression to extract the seven parameters weights was highly significant (F = 163.5, p < 0.001) and explained 52 per cent (R² = 0.518) of the depended variable “price premium”.

The new MBE model suggested here provides a relative index of brand equity for football club organizations that enables them to competitively compare the marketing equity of their club to that of their rivals. The MBE model also shows that commitment is a central component in the football club’s brand equity model. The current MBE model is the only model that provides a weight for each of the components. Each respective weight represents the internal contribution of each component to the final brand equity index. These weights indicate where an effort should be made to improve the equity of the brand.

Football teams may also need to focus on the constructs underlying the commitment (Shuv-Ami, 2012) of fans to their football club organization, that is, the team performance and satisfaction stemming from the fans’ experience with their team and the feelings of loyalty and involvement that represent the degree of fan engagement with the team. Although football teams do what they can to improve performance, much can be done in marketing to improve the other constructs and, thus, fan commitment. Improving the experience of fans, both on and off the field, regardless of whether the team is winning or losing, builds fan engagement.

The current research suggests two new brand equity models for football club organizations. One is a comprehensive theoretical model that combines and expands current conceptual brand equity models (Keller, 1993, 2008; Aaker, 1991, 1996; Keller and Lehmann, 2006); the other is an empirical model that makes it practical to measure the marketing strength or the brand equity of football clubs. The new empirical MBE suggested here provides a relative index of brand equity for football club organization that enable them to compare competitively the marketing equity of their club to that of their rivals. The MBE model also shows, for the first time, that commitment is a central component in the football club brand equity model. The current MBE is the only model that provides a weight for each of its component.

The purpose of this paper is to examine international football supporter behaviours within the context of national and socio-cultural identification, in an effort to better understand what role national identity plays in fan motivation and consumer behaviour for expatriate and non-domestic fans.

International football supporters across ten cultural and ethnic communities were surveyed throughout the 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup Finals, exploring the identification and new media socialisation behaviours of national team supporters in non-domestic markets.

The study’s findings provide evidence of the role identification plays in informing national and ethnic identities. Supporting one’s home or ancestral national team reflects an important element of national identification and socio-cultural place for expatriate or non-domestic supporters of international football. Importantly, new media behaviours provide supporters with a formative and productive source of national team fan engagement and ethnocultural community creation, particularly for younger target audiences.

These results bear particular significance for theory and practice: the digital socialisation behaviours supporters engage in are integral components of identity building and communication. In better understanding the awareness and interest of geographically detached sport consumers, this study offers new perspective into the opportunities present for sport organisations and marketers in reaching non-domestic fan nations.

The findings offer new perspective into the role national identification plays in fan involvement and motivation, and importantly how new media has emerged as a key platform for expatriate and non-domestic supporter socialisation amongst international football supporters.

This study aims to predict the determinants of net income of 101 US university football programs.

Guided by stakeholder theory, financial capacity model and resource dependency theory, the dependent variable was net income (indicated as profit or loss) and independent variables were measured as the number of women and men’s team sports, average home attendances, win–loss records, conference ranking, endowment funds and age of football programs. Statistical analysis was performed using Kendell tau and binary logistic regression (BLR).

Net income was positively and statistically associated with home attendance, win–loss record, conference rankings and endowment funds, but not number of women’s sports, age of football program and number of men’s sports teams. The BLR indicated that home attendance was the best predictor of net income.

The research was delimited to 101 Football Bowl Subdivision football programs from public universities.

The findings indicate that home attendance and conference rankings had the highest association with net income, but the former was the best predictor of net income and not football tradition nor number of sports teams.

The study was pioneering in the predictive evaluation of the possible determinants of loss or profitability in college football programs.

This study aims to examine the association between national economic prosperity (measured by per capita gross national income – GNI) and the acquisition of football workers (indicated by number of amateur footballers, football officials and professional footballers) and predict football performances (specified by qualifications at continental football championships) based on per capita GNI and football workers.

Archival data of 203 national football teams were utilized based on continental football championship records before 2014. Binary logistic regression analysis was used to build various models to ascertain their predictive values. Economically prosperous nations are those with a per capita GNI of more than US$10,000, and unprosperous nations are those with per capita GNI of less than US$10,000.

The analysis indicated that per capita GNI was significantly and positively associated with the acquisition of football workers – but not predictive of football performance. Rather football officials and professionals emerged to be the key predictors of football performance and not per capita GNI. The final model predicted 73.1 and 74.2 per cent of performance and non-performance, respectively, of national football teams correctly.

The findings were largely restricted to quantitative archival data for the last continental championships. However, future research may benefit from using qualitative interviews, questionnaires and or ethnographic studies of players, teams and or managers.

The results revealed that economic prosperity positively influences the acquisition of football resources (here – in football workers). Specifically, targeted production of football workers, such as the acquisition of a large number of effective professional footballers and officials, can boost football performance – and not merely economic prosperity.

Actual football-specific human capital (and not general population) was used in predicting continental football qualifications – a factor uncommon in such studies.

This paper aims to predict a college football team’s competitiveness using physical resources, human resources and organizational resources.

Guided by the resource-based theory, the study used archival data of 101 college football teams. The dependent variable was competitiveness (indicated by win-loss records), the independent variables were physical resources (operationalized as home attendance and total revenues), human resources (measured as coaches’ salary and coaches’ experience) and organizational resources (specified as conference rankings and the number of sports). Kendall Tau correlation and binary logistic regression were used to examine the associative and predictive competitive advantages.

The binary logistic regression model showed an overall percentage predictive correctness of 71.3%, with a Negelkerke R² of 41.1% of the variance of all predictors – with coaches’ experience, total revenues and home attendance being the best predictors of generating competitive advantages that produced superior win-loss records.

The research focused exclusively on physical, organizational and human resources as sources of competitive advantage and not physiological and/or psychological variables.

College football teams aspiring to be competitive may benefit from this study by applying a three-fold strategy of hiring well-paid high performing and experienced coaches who can increase attendance and revenues.

The study was unique in two ways – one, it made clear the positive significance of coaches’ experience as a source of competitive advantage, and second, it highlighted the catalytic effects of revenues and attendance in fueling competitiveness.