Sport Fan Consumption

2021 ◽  
pp. 232-253
Author(s):  
Lauren Michele Johnson ◽  
Wen-Hao Winston Chou ◽  
Brandon Mastromartino ◽  
James Jianhui Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Developmental Trends ◽  
Contemporary Research ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
Sport Fan ◽  
Or Team

Sports fans are individuals who are interested in and follow one or more sports, teams, and/or athletes. These fans reinforce their identity as a fan by engaging in supportive and repetitive consumption behaviors that relate to the sport or team they are so passionate about. This chapter will provide an overview of the history and cultural heritage of sports fandom, discuss the significance and functions of fandom, underline what motivates individuals to consume sports, examine the consequences and results of fandom, and highlight contemporary research and developmental trends. This chapter would allow for a good understanding of where research on sports fandom is headed and the important issues affecting sports fans.

Sport Fan Consumption

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Michele Johnson ◽  
Wen-Hao Winston Chou ◽  
Brandon Mastromartino ◽  
James Jianhui Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Developmental Trends ◽  
Contemporary Research ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
Sport Fan ◽  
Or Team

Sports fans are individuals who are interested in and follow one or more sports, teams, and/or athletes. These fans reinforce their identity as a fan by engaging in supportive and repetitive consumption behaviors that relate to the sport or team they are so passionate about. This chapter will provide an overview of the history and cultural heritage of sports fandom, discuss the significance and functions of fandom, underline what motivates individuals to consume sports, examine the consequences and results of fandom, and highlight contemporary research and developmental trends. This chapter would allow for a good understanding of where research on sports fandom is headed and the important issues affecting sports fans.

The Passion That Unites Us All

2018 ◽  
pp. 331-349
Author(s):  
Brandon Mastromartino ◽  
Wen-Hao Winston Chou ◽  
James J. Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Developmental Trends ◽  
Sport Team ◽  
Contemporary Research ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
Or Team

Sports fans are individuals who are interested in and follow a sport, team, and/or athlete. These fans reinforce their identity as a fan by engaging in supportive and repetitive consumption behaviors that relate to the sport or team they are so passionate about. This chapter will provide an overview of the history and cultural heritage of sports fandom, discuss the significance and functions of fandom, underline what motivates individuals to consume sports, examine the consequences and results of fandom, and highlight contemporary research and developmental trends. This chapter will allow for a good understanding of where research on sports fandom is headed and the important issues affecting sports fans.

The Passion That Unites Us All

2018 ◽  
pp. 52-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon Mastromartino ◽  
Wen-Hao Winston Chou ◽  
James J. Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Developmental Trends ◽  
Sport Team ◽  
Contemporary Research ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
Or Team

Sports fans are individuals who are interested in and follow a sport, team, and/or athlete. These fans reinforce their identity as a fan by engaging in supportive and repetitive consumption behaviors that relate to the sport or team they are so passionate about. This chapter will provide an overview of the history and cultural heritage of sports fandom, discuss the significance and functions of fandom, underline what motivates individuals to consume sports, examine the consequences and results of fandom, and highlight contemporary research and developmental trends. This chapter will allow for a good understanding of where research on sports fandom is headed and the important issues affecting sports fans.

A Magic “Bullet”: Exploring Sport Fan Usage of On-Screen, Ephemeral Posts During Live Stream Sessions

2021 ◽  
pp. 216747952110389
Author(s):  
Bo Li ◽  
Michael L. Naraine ◽  
Liang Zhao ◽  
Chenyang Li
Keyword(s):  
Magic Bullet ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Sport Fans ◽  
Sports Events ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Information Interaction ◽  
Sport Fan ◽  
Over The Top ◽  
Practical Implications

The bullet-screen function is an augmented comment feature that has been adopted by the majority of Over-the-Top (OTT) services to foster users’ interaction and watching experience. This feature empowers sports customers to post and view numerous, short, and fast-moving comments that overlap over the screen while watching live stream sports events in real time. This research aims to investigate how sports fans embrace the bullet-screen feature while watching live stream sports. Through a combination of thematic analyzing bullet-screen comments from a National Basketball Association Finals game, and semi-structured interviews among bullet-screen users ( N = 15), the results indicate that sport fans’ bullet-screen messages could be classified into five categories: critical commentary, socialization, supportive interactions, random messages, and trash talk. Four motives for sports fans to engage with bullet-screen posting were identified: entertainment, gathering information, interaction, and finding belonging. The study also showed that the inappropriateness of comments and too much overlay on the screen could prevent sports fans from utilizing the service. Theoretical and practical implications have also been discussed.

Playing with Lynching: Fandom Violence and the Black Athletic Body

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-183
Author(s):  
Poe Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Fan Studies ◽  
Black Athletes ◽  
Common Occurrence ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Parallel Development ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Jack Johnson ◽  
The Relationship

This article traces the parallel development of lynching culture and the fandom surrounding the black athletic body. While only recently have fan studies scholars started to theorize the relationship between racism, sports, and fandom activity, their shared history goes back to at least Jack Johnson, the first black boxer to win the heavyweight championship. From this first encounter with the black athletic body, sports fans with white supremacist leanings have employed lynching iconography and rhetoric to discipline athletes who challenged the general perception of how a public black figure out to behave. I argue that not only is racialized fan violence directed toward black athletes a common occurrence, but that the logics of lynching culture are deeply and perhaps irrevocably intertwined with those of sports fandom writ large.

I Love You Kid, But…: Intergenerational Soccer Fandom Conflict

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 893-904 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilan Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Religious Identification ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
The Family ◽  
Soccer Team ◽  
Four Levels ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Depth Interviews

Although sports fandom is one of the broadest and most significant social phenomena in modern life, few studies have examined the sources of children’s sports fandom. The reason may be related to the presumption that the main source of a child’s fandom is his or her father. Indeed, literature has repeatedly stressed the role of the family, and specifically the father, in shaping children’s identification with sports teams, alongside other social and psychological factors. The current study examines the significance of the untypical cases in which a son does not follow his father’s path and chooses to support a different soccer team. As uncommon cases frequently highlight what is commonly taken for granted, the current study explores the deep meanings of a disruption in fandom legacy that fathers typically take for granted. Through in-depth interviews with fathers whose children support a soccer team other than their own, the current study identifies that such fandom choices of sons, impact fathers on four levels, namely family legacy, team heritage, masculinity, and religious identification. Intergenerational fandom conflicts between father and son highlight the powerful implications of fans’ connections to their respective teams, and the continuing role of gender-based expectations in the world of sports.

Social Identity Theory in Sports Fandom Research

2020 ◽  
pp. 172-191
Author(s):  
Nicholas Hirshon
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Identity Theory ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Football Team ◽  
The University ◽  
Group Memberships

Sports fans are known to engage in BIRGing, or basking in reflected glory after their team wins, and CORFing, cutting off reflected failure following a team loss. These phenomena are related to social identity theory, which examines how group memberships shape a person's self-image. This chapter explores how media-attentive sports fans internalize victory and externalize defeat by charting the simultaneous developments in the 1970s of social identity theory, advanced by European social psychologists, and BIRGing and CORFing, which are rooted in a landmark study on college students wearing school-identifying apparel after the university football team won. The chapter also examines how social identity has served and can continue to be utilized as the theoretical backbone for research on mass-mediated sports fandom.

Classifying Sport Consumers

2020 ◽  
pp. 323-356
Author(s):  
David P. Hedlund ◽  
Rui Biscaia ◽  
Maria do Carmo Leal
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Demographic Characteristics ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Cluster Analyses ◽  
Sport Fans ◽  
Fan Behavior ◽  
Sport Fan

Sport fans rarely attend sporting events alone. While traditional consumer and sport fan behavior research often examines fans based on demographic characteristics, recent advances in understanding how sport fans co-create and co-consume sporting events provides substantial evidence that sports fans should be examined as tribal groups. Tribal sport fan groups can be identified based on seven dimensions, including membership; geographic sense of community; social recognition; shared rivalry; and shared knowledge of symbols, rituals and traditions, and people. In this research, these seven dimensions are used to classify sport fans (n=1505) through hierarchical and k-cluster analyses. The results of the cluster analyses using the seven dimensions suggest six unique clusters, labelled as (1) casual fans, (2) moderate remote fans, (3) moderate local fans, (4) local developing tribal fans, (5) remote tribal fans, and (6) tribal fans. A discussion of these six fan groups and the implications regarding associations with demographics and other important variables are provided.

Applying the Customer-Centric Model to the Investigation of Brand Communities of Professional Sports Teams

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anat Toder Alon ◽  
Avichai Shuv-Ami
Keyword(s):  
Factor Analysis ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Team Sports ◽  
Team Identification ◽  
Validity And Reliability ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
Brand Communities ◽  
Four Levels

This study employs the customer-centric model of brand communities (including fan-fan, fan-management, fan-team, and fan-product relationships) to examine sports fans through the two lenses of team identification and fan loyalty and explore the effect of these constructs on fans’ behavior. The study used an online panel-based survey to collect data from 742 football fans. Also, the study utilized exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and nomological network analysis to establish the validity and reliability of a new scale of fan-centric relationships of team sports clubs (TSCs). Utilizing structural equation modelling, it was demonstrated that all four levels of fan relationships significantly predicted both team identification and fan loyalty. Furthermore, both team identification and fan loyalty significantly predicted intention to attend games. Identifying and classifying the different levels of fan-centric relationships may provide TSCs with the potential to strengthen fans’ identification with and loyalty to the team and, consequently, increase consumption.

Gender, Sexual, and Sports Fan Identities

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Rachel Allison ◽  
Chris Knoester
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Negatively Associated ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Sports Fan

Using data from the National Sports and Society Survey (N = 3,988), this study analyzes associations between gender, sexual, and sports fan identities. The authors find that only 11% of U.S. adults do not identify as sports fans at all; also, nearly half of U.S. adults identify as quite passionate sports fans. Women and nonbinary adults are less likely to identify as strong sports fans compared with men. Compared with identifying as heterosexual, identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or another sexual identity is negatively associated with self-identified sports fandom. Yet, gender and sexuality interact such that identifying as gay (or lesbian) is negatively associated with men’s self-identified sports fandom but not women’s fandom. These findings persist even after consideration of adults’ retrospective accounts of their sports-related identities while growing up and their recognition of sports-related mistreatment.

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