“I Can’t Stand My Team, but I Can’t Live Without It”: Ambivalence Among Highly Identified Sports Fans

Highly identified fans are often the focus of brand strategists as they are usually investing time and money to follow the team (Richelieu and Pons 2009). However, highly identified fans represent some challenges for sports teams since they sometimes have mixed emotions toward the team and can engage in dysfunctional behaviors such as the use of abusive language, excessive drinking, and constant complaining of team decisions (Wakefield and Wann 2006). This study focuses on the latter manifestation among these dysfunctional fans and aims at better understanding the mechanisms that explain why these fans experience such strong conflicting emotions toward their favorite sport team. Another goal is to provide a typology of these fans using their rationales and motives to adopt such behaviors.