Mobile Apps as a Mean of Strengthening Football Fans Identification with the Team

Digital is transforming people’s way of live in every sphere. Smartphones and mobile apps are becoming symbols of such a huge reformation. Football as a part of sports industry is also under influence. Identification processes with teams in the football industry have a dramatic change due to digitalization. Indeed, official mobile app is growing in popularity among many European top football clubs. Since football fans are unique type of customers (Aichner, 2019) and football clubs are brands (Mohr and Merget, 2004) this paper is aiming to analyse psychological processes of mobile app engagement focusing utilitarian and social features to give a modern characteristic of the team identification. The scope of the study is mobile apps as а mean of strengthening football fans identification with the team. This research is using a Sport Spectator Identification Scale – SSIS (Wann and Branscombe, 1993) to measure level of fans team identification. Questionnaires about social and utilitarian features of mobile application as well as seven SSIS items are implemented in online survey by SurveyMonkey platform as a main research method. The results of the study is expected to show a significant role of social features in a customer engagement perspective which can propose a team identification as fans involvement through mobile app. The structure of this work consists of introduction, where the background and research design are examined, main body with literature review, methods substation, results of the study and the conclusion with references.