Resumo

A sports ecosystem is acclaimed as a presumption for assisting sports managers and vendors to tackle new business and marketing opportunities to reach more financial funds and revenues to a sports club through a range of goods and services in the form of experience and entertainment in a result and experience format to sports fans. Thus, a sports ecosystem reveals the actors' network that can help sports managers and sports marketers to implement activities and processes to organise a sports event.

How are the sports ecosystem of the Sport Club Corinthians, Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras (Palmeiras Sports Society), and São Paulo Futebol Clube (São Paulo Football Club) understood and perceived, according to their fans’ attributes? This paper aims to understand and analyse which fans’ attribute most interferes with their point of view regarding the sports ecosystem of the said football clubs from the city of São Paulo, Brazil – as well as, to observe the similarities and differences among them.

Sports managers have been required to coordinate actors' networks which should be composed of four groups of organisations or individuals. Four sports ecosystems were analysed to design our sports ecosystem model. The first sports ecosystem was designed by Collignon and Sultan (2014). The second sports ecosystem was presented in a report published by KPMG (2014). The third sports ecosystem was schemed by Maltese and Danglade (2014). Finally, Rundh and Gottfridsson (2015) created the fourth sports ecosystem. For us, a sports ecosystem should have business and marketing concepts.

Methodology: an exploratory study was designed comprising 78 topics using the Likert scale to be administered to 704 sports fans in 3 matches between February and March 2017. The analysis procedure followed three steps: (i) calculating the chi-square tests cross tables; (ii) selecting the topics which achieved more than 95% significance; (iii) and identifying that group of fans’ attributes that are most similar and most divergent.

Monthly Salary: Corinthians agree or disagree in some issues with Palmeiras, and Corinthians also agree or disagree on plenty of topics with São Paulo (more than Palmeiras, e.g.). Corinthians is the most different sports club in comparison to Palmeiras and São Paulo, taking into consideration transportation; On the one hand, Corinthians and São Paulo are very distinct about the monthly attendance; But the fans tend to have a distinct opinion about the interference of the media in the league since Palmeiras’ male fans tend to disagree and São Paulo’s fans agree.

Conclusion: Corinthians is different; monthly salary is the fan attribute most critical for Corinthians and Palmeiras; transportation is the second fan attribute most divergent, only for Corinthians; also, only Corinthians’ fans understand the stadium as a crucial dimension. Therefore, just one hypothesis and a half were achieved.

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