Challenges of Crowd Management in Iran’s Football Premiere League

Crowd management has been a necessary and integral part of the management of  any event due to diverse and large amount of attendees. Mismanagement of crowd might cause irreparable losses. The goal of this study was to explore the challenges of crowd management in Iran’s Premiere Football League in order to have an effective plan in this case.

The research was conducted using qualitative method with exploratory nature. Data were collected using 23 deep interviews with selective sampling and snowball technique. We employed thematic analysis to code and analyze data.

Results showed the existence of challenges in 57 concepts. These concepts were changed to 14 secondary concepts in second phase of coding. Finally we had 5 main category or theme in third phase of coding including structure, behavior, policy making, socio-cultural and identity of crowd management.

Awareness of those holding football matches in Iran from challenges presented in this paper could make them to try and plan for better management of challenges. This finally will lead to an increase in satisfaction of attendees and their decision to return, increase in safety and security standards and finally social and economic benefits.To design an effective crowd management model in Premiere League, a serious and careful consideration of these results originating from deep viewpoints of experts is proposed.