Relationships among Spectator Gender, Motives, Points of Attachment, and Sport Preference

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships among gender, type of sport, motives, and points of attachment to a team for spectators of selected intercollegiate sports. The significant MANOVA results indicated that gender explained 2% of the variance in motives and 3% of the variance in points of attachment; type of sport explained 4% and 7% of the variance in motives and points of attachment, respectively. A canonical correlation analysis suggested three significant and meaningful variates, which together showed a shared variance between motives and points of attachment in excess of 70%. This suggests that collegiate marketers and managers might want to design their marketing communications to emphasize the relationships among motives and points of attachment rather than trying to segment their fan and spectator base by gender or by type of sport.