Lost in Transition: Exploring the Effects of a Sports Team's Rebranding on its Supporters and their Relationship with the Club
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Change never stops! Over the past two decades, the number of sports teams that have changed their logo and name has multiplied. This phenomenon, known as rebranding, is not always successful, with one out of two rebrandings generating negative reactions from fans. In this research, I investigate how fans may perceive rebranding as a betrayal and the subsequent impact on their relationship with the club. Previous research has already established the effects of rebranding on fan identification and purchase behaviour, but the exploration of their relational trajectories remains understudied. To bridge this gap, I drew on the case of the Montreal Impact's rebranding in 2021. Through in-depth interviews with club supporters, podcasts, and forums, my findings revealed that the disruption of the club's identity and lack of fan involvement in the rebranding process were perceived as moral transgressions by fans. As such, their relationships with the club were divided into three possible trajectories: some fans accepted the rebranding and adapted their self-concept, others fought for the return of the previous identity, and others terminated their relationship with the club, going through a process of loss accommodation. This paper contributes to the consumer-brand relationship literature by demonstrating that a rebranding can act as a critical juncture in the relationship between fans and clubs. For practitioners, this research provides insights into managing a rebranding process, emphasizing the importance of transparent communication, incorporating fan opinion, and encouraging evolutionary image changes to maximize retention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".