The value of esports football. Towards new models of consumption and participatory experience in Italy

ABSTRACT

The growth of esports due to the suspension of live sporting events highlights a change in the consumption of ‘mediated' sports. While traditional sports have come to a halt, the data highlights how, conversely, the number of following e-sports events on streaming platforms such as Twitch has increased. Starting from the recent digital acceleration of sport world (for techniques and regulations of the game, dissemination sports content, management processes) the paper investigates on how much the relationship between football and efootball can affect the reconfiguration of dynamics of play and use and business models. Through a quantitative analysis, we wanted to understand the behaviour of e-football spectators and e-sportsmen who experience Fifa at an amateur level. The research was conducted in 2021 in Italy, involving 316 young adults (18–35 y.o.) belonging to the community of Fifa eplayers and viewers present on the Twitch platform. The main aspect that emerges from the research field is the ‘sportification' of e-sports as a process of participatory experience within a complementary consumption between football and e-football.

KEYWORDS:

• Esports
• entertainment
• football
• consumption
• sports
• society

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In this paper, the term e-football is used when we talk about digital football in esports to underline the difference from traditional football.

2 The term streamer defines a professional esports player.

3 From a methodological point of view, knowledge of the universe is not necessary for this type of sampling. Furthermore, it does not allow inference, so the results can only be extended to the chosen sample. As in this specific case, a type of "convenience" sampling can be defined when the researcher cannot go back to the total universe of observed reference cases (Porta and Keating, 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Mazza

Barbara Mazza is Associate Professor (Roma, Italy) in the Department of Communication and Social Research of the Sapienza University of Rome, where teaches Communication for Business Management and Event Management and Communication. Since 20017/2018 to 2023-24 she is President of the master's degree course “Organization and Marketing for business communication”. From 2015 she is the local coordinator of several research projects at national, European (Erasmus Plus) and international level, and a member of IRNIST, International Research Network in Sport Tourism. It is a scientific research network involving scholars from 38 universities in 17 countries around the world. She is co-director (with G. Russo) of an editorial series for FrancoAngeli entitled “Sport, Culture and Society” and she is part of the scientific committee of national and European journals including “Sociology of Communication” published by FrancoAngeli and a journal of the Spanish association of Research on Communication published by University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Giovanna Russo

Giovanna Russo PhD in Sociology and Political Sciences (qualified Associate Professor – 2018), she teaches General Sociology and Sociology of Social Change at “AMS” University of Bologna – Italy (Rimini campus). As Assistant professor in Sociology of Culture and Communications, her main topics of research are cultural consumption, well-being and wellness, practices of sport and physical activities, sporty consumption and communication, disability, religion, and migration. On these topics, she recently published: 2022, Italian Sports Policies for the Sustainable Development, in: International Perspectives on Sport for Sustainable Development, Cham, Springer Nature, pp. 205 - 224 (with B.Mazza); 2022, From whom comes the new question of well-being in Italy? Practitioners of Sport and Physical Activity, in: Sport and Quality of Life, Cham, Springer Nature, pp. 127 - 139; 2021, Integration by Sport and Physical Activities in Europe: An Introduction, «CULTURE E STUDI DEL SOCIALE», 6, pp. 229 - 244 (with W. Gasparinì).