Digital Fan Engagement with Football Clubs: Satisfaction, Belonging, and Sponsor Support

Purpose: This study examines how football fans’ satisfaction with club social media content influences their sense of belonging, defined through loyalty and trust, and how this, in turn, impacts their support for club sponsors. It addresses the need for sustainable, engagement-based revenue strategies in Iranian football, where traditional income sources are limited.Methodology: Data were collected from ۴۵۹ Iranian football fans via an online survey distributed through popular fan communities on Instagram and Telegram. The proposed model was tested using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM).Findings: The results indicate that satisfaction with social media content significantly predicts both trust and loyalty, with a more substantial effect on trust, particularly regarding trust in club management. Loyalty has a considerable impact on emotional support for sponsors. In contrast, trust in management influences transferred support, in which fans endorse sponsors based on institutional credibility rather than direct brand evaluation. Cognitive support was the weakest and least dependable of the constructs. These findings highlight the various mechanisms—emotional, rational, and delegated—through which fans demonstrate support for sponsors.Originality: This study makes two main contributions. First, it introduces and empirically tests the concept of transferred support, a sponsorship mechanism based on agency theory, in which fans trust sponsors through the club’s perceived competence and integrity. This idea is fundamental in emerging markets or areas with low sponsorship engagement. Second, the research contributes to the fan engagement literature by proposing a multidimensional model of belonging that integrates emotional (loyalty) and cognitive (trust) factors. By framing digital engagement within this broader identity perspective, the study offers a more comprehensive understanding of how clubs can utilize social media to foster lasting relationships and enhance their commercial value.

کلیدواژه ها:

Digital Engagement ، Fan Loyalty ، Sense of Belonging ، Social Media Satisfaction ، Sponsor Support