The determinants of brand loyalty of football supporters

: a study of Bundesliga

Abstract

The dissertation addresses the factors which influence loyalty for football supporters with re-gards to the Bundesliga. Success seemed to be important for football clubs and logically to be important for having a large group of supporters. In terms of membership numbers, the Bun-desliga shows a different result. There are several clubs which are not that successful in terms of performance but have a big amount of members. The dissertation gives a deeper insight on this problem and this can be seen in the main research question, that is the determinants influ-ence on loyalty of football supporters, especially for the Bundesliga. The results of online sur-vey of 167 respondents suggest that group affiliation, emotional stimulation, economic motives and self-identity correlate positively with loyalty. Interestingly, the factor of success does not appeal to be of an influence on loyalty of supporters. Additionally, four in-depth interviews with football supporters were conducted to gain a deeper insight. The results of the in-depth interviews have strength the results of the questionnaire and gave a further insight that values of the club, local proximity, being with friends and sharing memories are the main drivers for loyalty. The research serves as a contribution to the scientific process as preliminary work for metaregression.

Date of Award	29 Jun 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Marcin Awdziej (Supervisor)