An Empirical Study On The Soccer Fan Loyalty Of CSL Clubs

Over the years, the level of Chinese soccer has been difficult to meet the requirements of the majority of fans. After winning the runner-up at Asian Cup in 2004, Chinese soccer has been at low level for 10 years. In contract, Chinese professional soccer league has achieved rapid development. As we all know, professional league is the basis for the development of football. In 2004, the Chinese Super League (CSL) was born. After 10 years of exploration and development, Chinese Super League stands in an unprecedented boom, witnessing lots of large player transfers.In a professional league, a club is a operatonal unit, while fans are the basis of a club. In the prosperous football market caused by huge investment of club shareholders, the weaknesses of club brand building and fan base are exposed, resulting in the long-term deficit of clubs. Only if a league or clubs cultivate a large number of highly loyal fans, can they establish sound foundation and bring considerable economic benefits.We seldom see the empirical research in domestic sport market. In this paper, the CSL club loyal fans are set as research object to explore the relationship between club brand association, fan involvement and fan loyalty. This paper proposes the model framework that fan loyal is influenced by two independent variables——brand association and fan involvement. This paper adopts mature scales with appropriate adaption, and conducts sample survey in CSL fans for data, then uses SPSS and AMOS softwares for data empirical analysis to reveal club fan loyalty influential mechanism.According to the result of empirical study, this paper holds that Success, Head Coach, LOGO Design, Tradition, Fan ID, Pride in Place of Brand Associations and Pleasure, Sign of Fan Involvement have positive influence on the attitudinal aspect of Fan Loyalty—Psychological Commitment. Then Psychological Commitment has positive impact on Behavioral Loyalty. Finally, according to the empirical results of the data analysis, I suggest management implications for CSL clubs and League manager on how to strengthen brand building and improve the degree of fan involvement.