The British Olympic football team

Abstract

PurposeThe decision by the British Olympic Association to enter a soccer team into the Olympic Games of 2012, having not participated in the Olympic soccer competition since 1960, provided an opportunity to study representation as a predictor of fan identification. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachUsing a quasi-experimental research design, the authors empirically validated the value of representation by comparing the identity levels of homogeneous samples of English and Scottish respondents toward the Great Britain Olympic National Football, participating in the Olympic Games of 2012.FindingsOnly partial support for four sets of hypotheses was found. In general, there seemed to be low levels of identity of each of the samples with the football team, because neither English nor Scottish respondents perceived the team to be representative of them. Nevertheless, the results support the general notion that representation is a valuable predictor of consumer identification.Originality/valueRepresentation has been proposed as a central component of a sport team’s ability to serve as a symbol to their community, which enables the team to benefit from existing fan identities and the community the team is associated with. Yet, an empirical assessment of this phenomenon is lacking.