The way sports consumers feel connected to their beloved consumptive objects is a key and strategic element in modern sports marketing and management. In particular, when studying collective sports practices, the degree of sports fans’ identification with a team has captured significant academic and professional attention in the last thirty years. As emotional values and meanings are essential elements of team identification, understanding how to interpret, monitor and address emotions in identified fans can be a strategic lever for supply-side operators in the sports industry.

Group activities related to team identification can foster relative emotional significance which in turn has the potential to enhance fans’ well-being perceptions. In line with existing literature, this projects supports and enhances the distinction between the way fans identify with the team (i.e., fanship) and the way they identify with fellow fans and the surrounding fan community (i.e., fandom) ). Adopting the social identity approach as a theoretical framework, this project seeks to explore the emotional side of fanship and fandom through both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies.

This project highlights that fanship and fandom differ in terms of outcome variables. When fanship and fandom are high, elevated emotional attachment to the team might have a negative moderating influence in the relationships between fanship and subjective well-being as well as fandom and attitudinal loyalty.

Furthermore, when describing emotions raised by fanship and fandom, sports fans often underline negative, hurtful sensations as painful sporting episodes that have forged their own identification. In addition, this thesis underlines the peculiarities of live game attendance; the latter appears to foster the negative emotional attachment effects in the model and a focal element of fans’ emotionality when fanship and fandom are investigated.

Researcher: Giorgio Portaluri
Supervisor of the project: Francesca Vicentini
In collaboration with: Daniel Lock (Bournemouth University) e Yuhei Inoue (University of Illinois)