Online Sports Viewing and Fan Engagement Through Social Media: A Uses and Gratifications Study

Abstract

The study investigates whether personalization offered through digitally mediated sports applications shapes fans’ negative attitude toward stadium attendance, and whether the negative attitude subsequently envisages online sports viewing behaviour. Based on uses and gratifications theory, this study extends its conventional application to digitally mediated sports applications adoption through determining how gratifications drawn from one medium of consumption reshapes evaluation of another mode of viewing. Data were collected from 700 sports fans in Pakistan and 677 were retained who used digitally mediated sports applications and had attended at least one live match during the last one year. SPSS was used to apply data screening and descriptive analysis while PLS-SEM was applied through Smarts PLS 4 to test the hypothesized relationships. The outcomes of the study depicted that personalization had a significant positive effect on negative attitude toward stadium attendance (β = 0.466, p < .001), while negative attitude significantly enhanced online sports viewing behaviour (β = 0.616, p < .001). Further, the mediation analysis endorsed that negative attitude toward stadium attendance played an important mediating role between personalization and online sports viewing behaviour (β = 0.288, p < .001). The findings extend the explanation of UGT to the comparative evaluation of different consumption mediums and provide sports organizations and digital platforms with empirical evidence of how personalization shapes fans’ attitudes toward stadium attendance and their subsequent behaviour.

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