Bodet et al. JCC_final.pdf (155.33 kB)
Appetite for or resistance to consumption relationships? A trans-European perspective on the marketization of football fan relationships
journal contribution
posted on 2017-11-17, 10:44 authored by Guillaume S.P. Bodet, James Andrew KenyonJames Andrew Kenyon, Alain FerrandAlthough most sport organisations are encouraged to better manage the relationships they maintain with fans, little is still known about the types of relationships that fans want to establish with sport organisations. Also, as most suggested management and marketing practices come from professional sport organisations and European contexts, it is questionable whether they can apply to all sports organisations, and whether they are received in the same way by diverse fans from various socio-cultural contexts. Thus, the study aimed to explore football fans’ relational expectations towards their national football association across Europe and attitudes towards this marketization. Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted with several casual and die-hard fans from three European countries chosen for their heterogeneity: Armenia, Lithuania and England. Overall, and possibly in contradiction with numerous publications dealing with club football, the fans from the three countries did not express clear opposition or resistance towards the marketization of their relationships towards their national teams and associations. English fans seemed quite neutral or indifferent although Armenian and Lithuanian fans presented many characteristics of brandom demonstrating an appetite for this marketization.
Funding
The authors would like to thank UEFA for supporting this study through the UEFA Research Grant Programme.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Journal of Consumer CultureVolume
18Issue
2Pages
317-335Citation
BODET, G.S.P., KENYON, J.A. and FERRAND, A., 2017. Appetite for or resistance to consumption relationships? A trans-European perspective on the marketization of football fan relationships. Journal of Consumer Culture, 18(2), pp. 317-335.Publisher
SAGE Publications © The AuthorsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2017-11-07Publication date
2018-04-27Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the Journal of Consumer Culture and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517747092ISSN
1469-5405eISSN
1741-2900Publisher version
Language
- en