Exploring ‘Sport Love’: Conceptualisation, measurement and impact

Abstract

leisure time physical activity or, competitive sport, since ancient times. Sport leads to socialisation (Smith, 1988; Super et al., 2017) and may be a means to reducing participation in delinquency (Hass, 2001). Sport has also been a tool for promoting health, nationalism, and nation building development and peace, policies (Archetti, 1998; Arnold, 2018; Horak, 2016; Xu, 2006). Sport has garnered significant multidisciplinary attention over the years in modern societies, due to its implications for fan’s overall sporting experience (Funk, 2017; Klaus & Maklan, 2011; Yoshida et al., 2014). The intensities of sport love are extreme (Daniels et al., 2020). Fans identify with their loved teams, wear team jersey, paint themselves in the colours of their teams and support the team irrespective of the on-ground results. Such unwavering loyalty is irrational and rare. Understanding the emotional, psychological, and social aspects of sports love is crucial for optimizing strategies to enhance fan engagement, and leverage the social and cultural significance of sports in promoting peace, development, and nationalism. Against this backdrop, the research questions of this study are 1) How can FSL be conceptualized? 2) How can FSL be measured? 3) How FSL impacts fan engagement? 4) How can ASL be conceptualized and how is it different from FSL? 5) How do the implications of sport love differ from the perspectives of fans and athletes? The study was carried out in two distinct parts. The first part of the study identifies the determinants of FSL and follows a systematic method to develop a measurement scale for FSL. The study is conducted in the Indian context. Four factors of FSL, namely, passion, bonding, sport patriotism, and sport event orientation emerged as an outcome of an exploratory factor analysis. Further, these four factors were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis. Also, criterion validity of FSL was examined using fan engagement as a criterion. Thus, this research contributes to the knowledge on FSL and provides valuable insights for sports organisations, and policymakers to optimize fan experiences, harness the potential of sports as a social and cultural force in reinforcing nationalist sentiments and reviving other old indigenous sports which had not got much attention before. The second part of the study complements the first part by delving deep into elite athletes' sporting lives and utilizes their autobiographies to explore the mechanisms and manifestations of ASL. Seven autobiographies of elite athletes from both Olympic and non-Olympic sports were chosen. Reflexive thematic analysis was employed for data analysis. Data were coded through an interactive process to allow common themes to emerge around ASL. Five themes emerged from athletes’ perspectives of sport love: 'striving for excellence,' 'primacy of intrinsic rewards,' 'peremptory rectitude, 'multifaceted bonding,' and 'agony of separation'. The findings demonstrate how 'sport love' can be a basis for an athlete’s intrinsic motivation for sport as expressed through the identified themes. The findings critically reflect on earlier conceptions of sport love and extend theories of love into sports by revealing thematic concentrations on certain socio-psychological aspects unique to sports. The findings can assist organisations and policymakers in talent identification and development, athlete’s mental health and burnout monitoring, and sports integrity management across multiple sports. By adopting a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative exploration to capture the subjective experiences and social dynamics associated with sports love from both fans and athletes’ perspectives, and quantitative analysis to quantify sports love levels, this study seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding of the concept of sport love. As far as future research directions is concerned, nomological validity studies of FSL scale should be carried out by incorporating related constructs such as sport involvement. Also, ASL scale development, which was out of the scope of the current thesis work, should be done in future. Furthermore, athletes’ interviews and more athletes’ autobiographies should be included in future studies in order to enrich and extend the current work.