Chapter 2: Brand Love as a Trigger of Sport Tourism: A Study in Portuguese Football

Sports marketing is a very specific subject area linking academic research, marketing practitioners and public policy managers. Sports marketing and tourism are dynamic because of their active nature as they generate multiple affective means for consumers based on spectator behaviour and receive a high degree of attention due to the involvement of consumers. Therefore, and according to Valeri and Baggio (2020), the tourism destination has set itself as a key factor within the tourism management research, and in this the intermediaries sector plays a crucial role in connecting the destination's resources with the customers (Gajdošík & Valeri, 2022; Valeri & Baggio, 2021a, 2021b, 2022). In this context, football is a phenomenon with great importance in the world, with increasing power of influence, becoming a reference not only in the social and cultural sector but also in the economic and tourist level. In Portugal, no other sport attracts as many fans as football, having a great social impact that no other sport produces, managing to create intense and lasting bonds, linked to a strong emotional component where many consider football as the ‘king sport’, demonstrating the strong connection between the Portuguese and this modality (Peixoto & Sousa, 2021). In sports, the brand is gaining the interest of more and more researchers in order to be considered the most important asset of sports institutions where fans are consumers of the product ‘football’ as well as interested in the various aspects of the football club, based on the economic and financial balance of a club, being interested in ways that have an impact on the sports results of the team itself (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2018; Richelieu et al., 2011).