Sport team personality: It’s not all about winning!

As there is still no commonly accepted scale to measure the brand personality of sport teams, the purpose of this study was to develop and validate the Sport Team Personality Scale (STPS) in a professional sport context. The authors conducted a series of studies in the United States and United Kingdom with fans of the English Premier League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, and the National Hockey League. The STPS contains 18 items that load onto six factors: success, talent, entertainment, dedication, admiration, and care. The authors compared this new scale with existing sport team personality scales and used it to explore team identification and perceptual similarities and differences among teams. Results indicate that teams map along performance (i.e., success and talent) and character (i.e., admiration and care) factors and that the character factor is a more important source of team identification than the performance factor. Taken together, these results illustrate how the STPS can help sport managers position and differentiate teams within a league to improve marketing outcomes.