The Effect of Service Experience on Future Attendance of Football Spectators at the Stadium

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of service experience on future attendance of spectators in stadiums, with mediator role of their satisfaction. This study was descriptive-correlative type. The population of the research was all of the Iran Football Premier League spectators in 2018-19 season. According to Kline (2011), 200 to 300 samples are favorable for structural equation modeling. Thus, 282 people were selected by the convenience sampling method from the spectators of Esteghlal and Persepolis teams of Tehran. Three questionnaires were used to collect data including of service experience questionnaire from Pine and Gilmore (1998), spectators’ satisfaction and future attendance questionnaires from Oh et al. (2007). The data analyzed by Partial Least Square method. Findings showed that service experience has a direct and significant impact on satisfaction and future attendance of spectators. Also satisfaction has a positive and significant impact on future attendance of spectators. Furthermore, the results showed that service experience has an indirect and significant impact on future attendance of spectators through the mediator role of satisfaction. In general, service experience can intensely predict the behavioral intention of spectators; hence, it seems that designing meaningful experiences for spectators can be a new approach to sport event organizers to gain more market share in the tourism and leisure market.