Identifying the Factors Threatening the Team Identity of the Fans of the Iranian National Football Team

Threatening team identity is a new field in the literature of sports management and marketing that has recently been considered by researchers in this field. In this regard, the present study was conducted with the aim of identifying the factors threatening the team identity of national football team fans.

The method of the present research was qualitative research in the form of content analysis and the statistical population included national team fans that followed the Iranian Football Federation's Instagram page. The sampling method was purposeful and in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 participants until theoretical saturation. Coding technique and NVivo version 10 software were used to analyze the data.

The results showed the factors threatening the team identity of national team fans in seven themes; weak financial management, poor executive management and illegitimate management of the federation, improper selection of players, improper selection of technical staff, poor brand of invited players and poor performance of the team are categorized.

The results of this study, on the one hand, eliminate the huge scientific gap in the literature threatening team identity in domestic and foreign research, and on the other hand, Managers can recognize their inappropriate actions and weaknesses in the field of threatening the team identity of national team fans and put effective strategies and strategies on their agenda to at least be able to reduce the number and amount of these factors.