Investigating Fans’ Social Media Engagement With Their Favorite Football Team: The Role of Sport Involvement,Team Identification,and Subjective Perceptions of Performance
Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online September, 2025
Investigating Fans’ Social Media Engagement With Their Favorite Football Team: The Role of Sport Involvement,Team Identification,and Subjective Perceptions of Performance
This study explores the antecedents of fans’ social media engagement with their favorite football team, focusing on sport involvement, team identification, and subjective perceptions of performance through the lens of the Consumers’ Online Brand-Related Activities (COBRAs) framework. Data was collected from 609 football (i.e., soccer) followers of a sport Facebook page. The structural equation model analysis results showed that sport involvement predicts team identification, and that team identification leads to subjective perceptions of performance. Team identification was related to all social media engagement dimensions (i.e., consumption, contribution, and creation), whereas involvement was associated only with consumption and subjective perceptions of performance only with creation. Also, team identification was shown to mediate all the relationships between sport involvement and engagement dimensions, while subjective perceptions of performance mediated the team identification/creation relationship. This research expands on the literature surrounding social media fan engagement, highlighting the key role of sport team identification in shaping online fan behavior.
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