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With the ever-increasing popularity of smartphones, it has become one of the most important medium to increase sport fan engagement. However, very little attention has been paid to understand how fans use smartphones to follow sport. With that in mind, the purpose of this paper is to investigate specific factors that influence the use of smartphones in the sport consumption context.

This research empirically examined theoretical relationships between three categories of variables (perceptions toward smartphones, sport-specific factors, and smartphone-specific factors) and intention to use the smartphone in following sports.

Of the 11 proposed hypotheses, eight hypotheses were supported. Approximately 79.4 percent of variance in the usage intention was explained by the three categories of the variables.

As one of the first to take a holistic approach toward understanding sport consumption behaviors using smartphones, results of the current research can be employed as a base for studies examining other multi-functional technology medium in various sport settings.

This study proposes a conceptual model to comprehensively understand how sports fans perceive and accept smartphones and applications in a sport consumption context by developing a series of propositions. Theoretically based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Sport Website Acceptance Model (SWAM), this study provides fundamental groundwork to better conceptualise sports fans' decision making processes involving the latest technology used to consume sport.

This study examines the effect of four acculturation strategies (integration, assimilation, separation and marginalisation) on identification with and consumption of American football for the Asian population in the United States. Using Berry's (1990, 1997) bi-dimensional model of acculturation as a theoretical framework, significant differences (based on the four acculturation strategies) between football identification and consumption were found. In addition, this study examines the relationships between acculturation, ethnic identity, identification with, and consumption of, the sport among the Asian population. The results indicate that acculturation plays a significant role in explaining participants' identification with, and consumption of, the sport, whereas ethnic identity does not.

Despite the remarkable economic power and rapid growth of the Asian population in the USA, relatively little attention has been paid to this group in the sport management literature compared to African-Americans and Hispanics. In addition, sport management scholars have paid limited attention to two important cultural factors: ethnic identity and acculturation. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This study attempted to examine a comprehensive sport consumption model for Asians by testing theoretical relationships between these two cultural factors (ethnic identity and acculturation), fan identification, and sport consumption behavior.

The structural equation modeling results indicated that ethnic identity indirectly affected consumption of sport products reflecting attributes of a native country, e.g. ethnic player popular sports in a native country through identification with the sport products. In contrast acculturation indirectly affected consumption of sport products reflecting attributes of a host country, e.g. popular sports in a host country.

The results of this study provide implications on how sport marketers should effectively design sport products based on the Asians’ levels of acculturation and ethnic identity.