Football tourism: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Objective of the study: to investigate the scientific production on football tourism literature, developing an overview of academic research related to the theme.
Methodology/approach: systematic review of the literature, with a qualitative approach and exploratory-descriptive nature. Thus, after searching three databases, 16 articles published between the years 2015 and 2020 were selected.
Originality/Relevance: despite football tourism having gained notoriety in recent years, both in the scope of scientific publications and in the increase in travel motivated by football interest, the analysis of theoretical and methodological advances emerges as unprecedented and indispensable.
Main results: thus, it was noticed that these studies seek to analyze the profile and behavior of visitors, the motivations of displacements, the services offered by the tours, the impacts caused by sports mega-events and Covid-19. With regard to methodology, it was found a balance between qualitative and quantitative approaches, and a lower percentage (12.5%) of research using mixed methods. In this case, as a highlight of qualitative studies, ethnographic research in the field of football tourism stands out. While in quantitative approaches, there is an innovation in the way of analyzing data, with the use of Monte Carlo methods and unconditional quantile regression, in addition to the confirmatory factor analysis and the social accounting matrices.
Theoretical/methodological contributions: from an analysis of the theoretical and methodological contributions of these articles, a synthesis was elaborated to report how such studies address the displacement of fans and the tourist attractiveness of stadiums, as well as the methodological procedures applied in the research.