Title: So your team is out ... now what? US soccer fans and the 2018 FIFA Men's World Cup

Authors: Sam Winemiller; Adam Love; Jeffrey A. Graham; Seungmo Kim

Addresses: School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 100 Manning Hall, 216 Lenoir Drive, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3360, USA ' Department of Kinesiology, Recreation, and Sport Studies, University of Tennessee, 322 HPER Building, 1914 Andy Holt Avenue, Knoxville, TN, 37996-2700, USA ' Department of Kinesiology, Recreation, and Sport Studies, University of Tennessee, 322 HPER Building, 1914 Andy Holt Avenue, Knoxville, TN, 37996-2700, USA ' Department of Sport, Physical Education, and Health, Hong Kong Baptist University, Room AAB 932, 9/F Academic and Administrative Building, 15 Baptist University Road, Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Abstract: In 2018, the US men's national soccer team failed to qualify for the FIFA World Cup for the first time since 1986. The purpose of the current study was to investigate how sports fans react when their favourite team is not participating in a competition by surveying US soccer fans about the 2018 World Cup. In the current study, 841 US soccer fans completed a survey asking about which alternate teams they planned to support, the reasons for supporting a particular team, as well as their levels of soccer involvement, nationalism, and internationalism. Respondents most frequently intended to support Germany, and the ten most frequently supported teams were all from Europe or Latin America. With respect to reasons for supporting a given team, team-specific factors tended to be more important than relational-type factors.

Keywords: fandom; involvement; nationalism; internationalism; soccer; international sport; sport marketing; sponsorship; World Cup; FIFA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSMM.2024.135614

International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, 2024 Vol.24 No.1, pp.58 - 74

Accepted: 05 Apr 2023
Published online: 19 Dec 2023 *

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