Rise up Suns: A Longitudinal Study of Sport Fan Development

Abstract

Sport fans are key stakeholders for professional sport teams. Fans contribute both indirectly and directly to revenue streams and thus help teams to remain sustainable. However, the sport marketplace is an increasingly competitive landscape where a growing number of teams compete to attract, retain and develop fans. Such competition necessitates research that better outlines how and why individuals become team fans. Building on this opportunity, the current research investigates how the process of team identification can be used to understand fan development. Overall, this research contributes to existing theory by detailing the factors and processes that underpin fan development. The Psychological Continuum Model (PCM) was used as the theoretical framework to guide this research. The PCM provides a developmental framework that can be used to understand the progression of psychological connections with sport objects. Specifically, the PCM conceptualises how an individual may move from simply being aware of a team through three additional stages of team connection, culminating in team allegiance. The current research advances the PCM as a fan development framework by incorporating social identity theory into the model. In doing so, team identification was identified as a construct that can be used to examine the processes that lead to fan development. To better understand the processes that explain fan development, three studies were conducted. These studies gathered both quantitative (Study 1) and qualitative (Study 2 and Study 3) data, providing the researcher with cross-sectional and longitudinal data relevant to the investigation. All data were collected from fans of a new professional sport team located in Australia.