Sports Management: Understanding Sports Fan Typologies and Implications of Sports Marketing

Running Head: SPORTS MANAGEMENT
SPORTS MANAGEMENT
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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Sports fan typologies..................................................................................................................3
2.1 Tired fan typologies..........................................................................................................5
Fan characteristics......................................................................................................................7
Commitment...............................................................................................................................7
Brand equity...............................................................................................................................8
The implication of sports marketing..........................................................................................9
Conclusion................................................................................................................................10
Self-reflection...........................................................................................................................11
Reference list............................................................................................................................13

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Introduction
Fan followers are evident at all the places. Most commonly, it is the growing
enthusiasm of some of the people towards other people or activities and events that tend to
bring blissful emotion. However, for a sports fan, enthusiasm is directed towards a specific
team or sports. Despite the variations in their range of interest, general features of the sports
fan are exhibited by the sports enthusiast.
Therefore, it is a normal trend for the sports fan for they have strong desire to acquire
and possess the material and objects with respect to their choice as well as to stay close to
their context of affection. This easily illustrated the reason behind the huge sports stadium
that is filled with fan followers and sports ticket that are always easily sold out in spite of the
surged price.
For instance, sports fan often has the desire to get engaged externally through
consistent social media communication with their fellow fan followers in several ways. This
has been most incredible noted with the number of increasing fan followers sites such as
Twitter and Facebook. Based on this issues and factors, the report focuses on the recognisable
characteristic of the sports fan as consumers along with the implications of sports marketing.
Sports fan typologies
The aim of the typologies is to evaluate and understand the changing behaviour of the
sports consumer over a due course of time that has been a standing objective of the sports
marketer. In addition to this, the purpose of the typologies is to recognise the different models
of sports consumption by conducting a differentiating analysis of the major works in relation
to the current period.

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Figure 1: Sports fan typologies’
(Source: Heere & Gordon, 2015)
In this context, Woratschek, Horbel and Popp (2014) conducted a dual approach for
differentiating between modern fan and temporary fans to recognise the different types of
clubs and team. Yoshida, Heere and Gordon (2015) stated that a stronger an individual often
recognises himself as a fan, relatively more than the individual uses their specific
identification. However, being a fan is not always a temporary way for self-identification.
Specifically, temporary fans interest are in the phenomenon of the short-term period.
After their short-term interest is over, these types of fan are no more motivated to
exhibit fan following behaviour associated with sports subjects. The time boundary, in this
case, is usually a differentiating fan from other sports. On the devoted fan is those who
remain quite loyal to their supporting team despite the fact that their short-term event of
captivation is over. In this regards, Norris, Wann and Zapalac (2015) stated that a devoted fan
often possesses an attitude of referring their teams as" my team right or wrong". In this case,
a devoted fan often uses their attitude of being the fan as a necessary aspect for self-
identification.
In contrast to this typologies Lock and Funk (2016) argued that there are authors that
labelled recognised themselves as the team that was popularly known as the Oilers and were