Abstract

A sports ecosystem aims to guide marketers to propose, design and operate a marketing plan with the purpose of obtaining several sources of financial funding for undertaking new business strategies for the sports club. Thus, this paper aims to understand and analyse the sports ecosystem of Corinthians, Palmeiras and São Paulo sports clubs according to their fans opinion, and checking the similarities and differences among the clubs. Concerning the methodology, an exploratory study was designed comprising 79 topics using the Likert scale to be administered to 704 sports fans in 9 matches between February and March 2017. In general, the analysis procedure followed four stages: (i) calculating the parametric analysis (ANOVA) and post-hoc schefee tests; (ii) selecting process of the issues which achieved the significance <= 0,05 (5%); (iii) observing and settling on which group of fans that agreed or disagreed with other fans; (iv) standing out that topics (and axis) that are most similar and most divergent. Regarding the findings and results, Corinthians is different from Palmeiras and São Paulo in six out of seven axes; club management, stadium, and partnerships and sponsorships are the most critical dimensions; and São Paulo has the best club management axis. Therefore, just one hypothesis and a half were confirmed. Knowing the sports ecosystem axes increases the chances of designing the sport business and marketing plan suitable according to customer-fan orientation principle.

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