Football

Football is played at a professional level all over the world, and millions of people regularly go to football stadium to follow their favorite team, while billions of people watch their favorite team match through live streaming site as well as television. In world, a large fraction of people play football in amateur level. According to the survey conducted by the FIFA published in 2001, more than 240 million people from the globe enjoy football regularly in more than 200 countries. In other word, football evokes great passions and provide and important role in the life of their loyal fans, local communities, and even the nation like Brazil; it is hence the most popular sport in the world. Because of this it is often dubbed the World’s Favorite Pastime.  

The Prediction Football Phenomenon

The premise of prediction in football allows individual participants to act as general managers or owners of their own sports team. Typically, participants compete weekly against other participant in the league style format. This competition usually last throughout the regular seasons and is directly associated with real world professional football in England. The game primarily an online service that is completely customizable, interactive, and involves nearly every major professional football from Europe (Dwyer, 2011).

Fan Loyalty

A loyal consumer displays intense recurring behavior and a strong, positive attitude toward a product (Dwyer, 2011). Early research into the consumer loyalty paradigm, however, focused primarily on behavioral responses for measuring loyalty, and failed to explain why individuals repeatedly purchase particular brand. Stemming from this research football fan loyalty is viewed as two dimensional paradigm involving both fan’s attitude and behaviors. Nevertheless, for decade’s football management, football sociology, and football psychology researchers have focused primarily on behavioral indicators of fan loyalty. Such as spectator attendance figures and football merchandise purchases (Dwyer, 2011).  However similar to traditional consumer loyalty football fan loyalty requires an investigation beyond the behavioral characteristics. That is football fans can also be segmented by the degree of attachment to a team or vent which is conceptualized as an individual’s highly developed attitude toward the football features.

With the development in the internet technology the football promotion in the world is enhanced in the terrific way. The day to day news on the purchase and sales of players, team selection, match results, fixtures schedules, and injury of players all play important role for the football fan to encourage visiting football site to update them.

The Television Audience

The number of live matches broadcast since the premier leagues since the premier league’s first season in 1992/93 has increased significantly from 60 (during 1992/97) to the 138 currently broadcast. In addition, since 2004/05 season, BSkyB broadcast all Saturday Premier League matches not televised live on a near-live basis that evening (Sky Sports Football First program). Total viewing of premier league content has increased, average audiences per match has remained largely constant while the number of games broadcast has increased indicating that total viewing of game over course of the season also increased. Viewers appear to be tuning in to watch more live match program. In 2002/03 the average number of live match programs watched was about 10 matches. By 2004/05 this has raised about 12 to 13 games (Capita, 2005).

Stadium Attendance

Stadium attendance has also increased. In last five seasons, average Premier League match attendances have increased (from 31,180 per match in 1999/2000 to 33,899 in 2004/05). For the same period overall stadium utilization in the league also increased from 91% to just over 94% (Capita, 2005).

Premier League Fan

Adults who identify themselves as having some level of interest in the premier league by agreeing with one of the following statements: “I follow the premier league, but I am not a very active fan”; “I have strong interest in the premier league”; “The premier league is one of the passions in my life”.

Socio Economic Groups in Football (SEG)

A social classification, classifying the population into social grades, usually on the basis of the market research society occupational groupings (MRS, 1991). The groups are defined as follows:

Professionals such as doctors, solicitors or dentist, chartered people such as architects; fully qualified people with large degree of responsibility such as senior civil servants, senior business executives and high ranking grades within the armed police force (Capita, 2005).

People with very senior jobs such as university lectures, government heads, bankers, police inspectors etc. All others doing non manual jobs including the nurses, technicians, salesman, workers, students etc.

Almost 2000 fans were interviewed between November 2004 to April 2005 as a part of research conducted by the authorities of the league that result a quarter of the UK population say they are fans of the league with the majority of the youth age 25-34 years old. And half of the fans say they support the top five clubs in the league. And around the third fans view football through the internet live telecast (Capita, 2005).

Impact of television and internet on the match attendance

Ticket cost and availability are the most commonly mentioned reasons given by premier league fans that attend matches for not attending more matches. The ability to watch the same match live on internet was mentioned by a smaller portion of respondent.

Analysis of European Premier League Fans

Over half of fans say they follow the league on the social media but they are partly not active, about a third say they have strong interest in the match but a tenth of them say they have passions on the football matches (Capita, 2005).

Usually the numbers of fans based on the clubs are highly directed towards the top five biggest clubs in England. The following graph show the percentage of the fans based on the clubs (Capita, 2005).

Among 60% of the all European believe football as a religion to themselves (Centre, 2008).The main sources of information is the websites for the sports fan to find about latest news update. In 2008 among 68% of the football fan update themselves from the club official’s websites whereas 15% fan uses unofficial websites and 3% of football fan update with the help of other sports site. But this ratio slightly decreases in 2010 AD where the percentage of fan using the official’s site decrease to 55%, the unofficial website visitors increased to 21% and other sports site visitors increased to 7%. This ratio shows the number of football fan using website to update them. The following diagram shows the football fan believing football as a religion and the different percentage of fan using website to update them.