Creating a sport brand in Turkey: A study on branding attitude of Turkish football teams' fans

Nowadays, the economical values created by brands vastly surpass the economic growth of many countries. That is why many countries try to get influential brands in an attempt to continue their existence in an international level and become a force to be reckoned with. From this perspective, almost in all the sectors around the globe, there is a struggle for becoming a brand. One of the most prominent among them is the world of sport. The economical values created by the world of sport, especially by the football, caused what once was an entertainment to turn into an industrialized event. Many countries around the globe gain an undeniable economic income through the brand values they acquired from football teams and players. In the light of all these troths, in this thesis, the discussion of creating a sport brand in Turkey requires upmost attention. Especially in this discussion on football sector, as one of the most important footholds of becoming brands, the fans are the primary focus. With this thesis of getting the fans' attitude towards Turkish teams becoming brands, topics on seeing whether the creation of a sport brand in Turkey is possible or not and getting fans' point of view on the matter will be revealed. This thesis's nature consist of football fans while the sample of it consists random-picked 542 football fans. A quantitative study method is used. In this scope, data is collected between 01.05.2019 – 01.08.2019 via surveys and those statistical analyses are synthesized with SPSS 22.0 package program. Making of all the statistical processes during the construction of database and analysis phase are done on computer. Factor analysis, kurtsosis - skewness analysis, t-test, one way anova and frequency analysis is used in the analysis of the data. According to the findings, it shows that the fans' attitudes towards football clubs' becoming brands differ depending on the variables.