The loyalty of football fans — We'll support you evermore?

Abstract

The conventional wisdom among football fans is that every supporter is unstintingly loyal to their adopted team. Indeed this was accepted by Parker and Stuart in their award winning paper ‘The West Ham Syndrome’. However, more recent work by Tapp and Clowes describes a much more complex and interesting picture than was hitherto thought to be the case. In this paper the author further reports on this supporter data focusing specifically on loyalty. Previously unreported data that compared season ticket holders with lapsed season ticket holders is analysed. Supporters are identified as possessing a variety of loyalty behaviours and attitudes, some of which exhibit loyalty patterns quite similar to, say, supermarket goods sectors. However, the underlying explanatory factors are quite different to those present in mainstream sectors. These are discussed.