The British Olympic football team : a quasi-experimental assessment of support for a new sport team among Scottish and English football fans

Hills, Stephen, Heere, Bob and Walker, Matthew (2018) The British Olympic football team : a quasi-experimental assessment of support for a new sport team among Scottish and English football fans. International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, 19 (3). pp. 276-289. ISSN 1464-6668

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Abstract / Description

Purpose
The decision by the British Olympic Association to enter a soccer team into the Olympic Games of 2012, having not participated in the Olympic soccer competition since 1960, provided an opportunity to study representation as a predictor of fan identification. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Design/methodology/approach
Using a quasi-experimental research design, the authors empirically validated the value of representation by comparing the identity levels of homogeneous samples of English and Scottish respondents toward the Great Britain Olympic National Football, participating in the Olympic Games of 2012.

Findings
Only partial support for four sets of hypotheses was found. In general, there seemed to be low levels of identity of each of the samples with the football team, because neither English nor Scottish respondents perceived the team to be representative of them. Nevertheless, the results support the general notion that representation is a valuable predictor of consumer identification.

Originality/value
Representation has been proposed as a central component of a sport team’s ability to serve as a symbol to their community, which enables the team to benefit from existing fan identities and the community the team is associated with. Yet, an empirical assessment of this phenomenon is lacking.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	** From Crossref via Jisc Publications Router.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Olympics, representation, football, soccer, team identity
Subjects:	700 The arts; fine & decorative arts > 790 Recreational & performing arts
Department:	Guildhall School of Business and Law
SWORD Depositor:	Pub Router
Depositing User:	Pub Router
Date Deposited:	13 Jul 2018 10:54
Last Modified:	02 Dec 2019 11:39
URI:	https://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/id/eprint/2592

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