When sponsorship causes anger: understanding negative fan reactions to postings on sports clubs’ online social media channels

ABSTRACT

Research question: Fans’ perception that sponsors are a financial need illustrating the increased commercialisation in sports is not always aligned with their view of a club’s culture. This perceived imbalance represents a challenge in the online marketing strategies of sports clubs. When club managers decide on the content of online social media posts/messages related to sponsors, they should be aware of potential fan reactions. Therefore, this study analyses how sponsor-related and other online social media communication of football clubs affect fan reactions.

Research methods: We analyse Facebook postings (N = 4,603) published by German first division football clubs. After classifying postings regarding their content, we regress ‘Reactions’, ‘Shares’, and ‘Angry’ reactions on the content variable and further covariates. Linear regression models, Poisson regression models, and general dominance statistics are used for exploring variance within the data.

Results and Findings: Fans react considerably angrier to sponsor-related posts than to other content except for defeat-related postings. Regarding overall reactions and shares, sponsor-related posts perform worst among different contents. In addition, the content of posts is elementary to negative reactions, but of less importance to overall reaction rates.

Implications: Sports managers and sponsors should be aware of the potential negative shift in reactions when using clubs’ social media channels to share sponsor-related content. We recommend releasing sponsor-related posts as videos on game days to decrease the fraction of negative responses and simultaneously maximise the overall reactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• Sponsorship
• Social Media
• Football
• Sports Fans

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Even if the post is contractually fixed, the decision to sign the contract with a sponsor regarding posts on their OMSC is a free choice from a club’s perspective.

2 Facebook itself offers the choice between like, love, sad, surprised and angry. Therefore, we only collected the information on likes and angry reactions and did not code the reactions by ourselves in any way.

3 Although we considered the possibility to increase the data set in the aftermath, this was technically not possible due to a potential selection bias, a restriction of automatic data collection from Facebook after 2018 and impossible manual data collection due to a memory overload of the browser.