A social identity approach to Italian football fanship, fandom, emotional attachment, and well-being

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, the degree of sports fans’ identification with a team has captured significant academic and professional attention in the last thirty years. Emotions are crucial components in team identification and understanding how to interpret, monitor and address this emotional side can be a strategic lever for supply-side operators in the sports industry. In line with existing literature, this thesis supports and extends 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 (SIA) as a theoretical framework, this thesis aims at exploring the how fanship and fandom. Empirical data were collected from fans of two Italian Serie A football teams, namely S.S. Lazio and A.S. Roma. The proposed model highlights that fanship and fandom differ in terms of outcome variables. When fanship and fandom are high, elevated emotional attachment to the team has 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. This thesis has several elements of theoretical originality including: (a) advancing academic knowledge concerning fanship, fandom and emotional attachment to the team, proposing a structural model and first-ever qualitative investigation; (b) highlighting the importance of emotions and the centrality of subjective well-being when live game attendance is 6 explored; (c) a first-ever systematic literature review concerning fan and team identification research is here presented; (d) fanship and fandom research is here advanced in terms of Italian football industry peculiarities. From a managerial perspective, this thesis frames team fans as emotional stakeholders of sports organisations, thus highlighting how being able to anticipate, monitor and address the emotional sensitivity and needs is strategic to enhance core organisational objectives.