Sport Fans' Feelings of Pride

Abstract

This article attempts to shed some empirical attention on sport fans' feelings of pride toward multiple sport consumption objects (e.g., team color, logo, home stadium, fight songs, and glory of the past). Data were collected from spectators at professional soccer and baseball games in Japan. The results from Study 1 provided evidence of the scale's construct validity and supported the notion that fans' pride feelings positively influence their identification with the team as well as with the fan community. In Study 2, we found further evidence of construct and nomologi-cal validity and concluded that there were two important sequential relationships (1) between fans' feelings of pride toward tangible sport consumption objects (e.g., logo and stadium), team identification, and conative loyalty and (2) between pride feelings toward objects related to communal fan experiences (e.g., logo and fight songs), fan community identification, and conative loyalty.