Internationalization of Iran football Clubs’ Brand

The purpose of this study was to identify the key factors affecting the brand internationalization of Iranian football clubs and design a framework for a better understanding of this issue. This survey enjoys an exploratory and qualitative nature, having used the grounded theory method. The research population included experts in the field of football and sport. For sampling, targeted methods and snowball technique were used. The data collection method was a semi-structured interview and this work continued to reach the concept of theoretical saturation, and interviews were conducted with 32 experts from the football industry. The stages of qualitative data analysis were accomplished in the form of three open, axial, and selective coding steps. In the first stage, 139 final open codes were obtained, in the second stage, open codes were categorized to the 17 axial codes including brand, management, team, communication, hard power, soft power, industry, customers, competitors, political environment, economic environment, social and cultural environment, technological environment, geographical and natural environment, national infrastructure and international prestige. The results of this study showed that the factors affecting the internationalization of the brand of Iranian football clubs could be divided into three internal environment, intermediate environment and external environment. Furthermore, internationalization of the brand of football clubs in Iran is the result of interaction, communication and feedback of these three the environments together, that have been introduced in the conceptual framework of environments that affect the internationalization of football clubs’ brand.