Association football (soccer) is the physical team sport played with a spherical ball between two teams of 11 players and the world’s most popular sport.
Published in Chapter:
Soccer Esports in Europe: Brands, Partnerships, and Business Opportunities in Professional Football
Remco M. Beek (Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands), Jos F. Verschueren (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium), and Inge Derom (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)
Copyright: © 2021
|Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-7300-6.ch006
Abstract
The commercial playing field of association football (soccer) has radically changed due to the professionalization of soccer simulation games into soccer esports. This new phenomenon is woven into the international soccer culture as global communities arise in the interconnection of professional soccer clubs, esports players, and fans. Global brands explore the opportunities to engage with these communities through partnerships. This chapter examined soccer esports cases in European soccer to (1) clarify the rise of soccer esports based on four stages of globalization (digital, social, geographical, and commercial), (2) categorize the brands involved in this complex ecosystem, and (3) identify business opportunities in brand strategies, attractiveness of the game, and sponsorship partnerships to improve the value co-creation processes for the soccer industry. This current state and future pathways support decision-makers in the sports industry and serves as a reorienting perspective for scholars to bridge the gap between business practice and academic inquiry in research and education.