Mapping the perceptions and antecedents of football fans’ co-creation behaviours with sponsoring brands: a pan-cultural study of the European leagues

To date, research on football fans and co-creation has been limited. Prior research, through the lens of service-dominant logic, has conceptualised fans as active, commanding and critical influencers, revealing complex, multifaceted and developing co-creative relationships, but invariably only with their teams, clubs and online communities, limiting what is currently known about fans, sponsors and co-creation. Given this gap, the current study seeks to explore the perceptions and antecedents of this relationship across European football leagues with an emphasis on understanding perspectives on user generated advertising, developing social media content, creating brand culture and new product/services development for sponsoring brands. Exploratory in outlook, the paper adopts a social constructionist position, utilising 296 participants, from 9 leagues and incorporating 59 clubs. The study reveals the dynamic nature of the fan/co-creation relationship, with data indicating that fanatical and regular fans view co-creation as a cynical, intrusive and disruptive process, while casual fans seem more willing to engage, albeit episodically and driven by the anomalous emotions of guilt and superstition. The paper uncovers behaviours that offer insight for both brand managers and clubs into the reality of fan engagement in the context of co-creation. This offers a contribution to theory by positing five new behavioural categories related to perception of and engagement with co-creation activity: Defectors, Rejecters, Absorbers, Moralisers and Repenters.