Tourism in Football: Exploring Motivational Factors and Typologies of Groundhoppers : An example of a German Groundhopper Online Community

Abstract: This thesis aims to examine the motivational factors and to explore possible typologies of groundhoppers. Groundhopping as a special form of sports tourism which has grown rapidly over the last couple of decades. Given the fact, that there has been a lot of research in the field of sports tourism it is quite interesting to see that up to this day, there is hardly any in-depth research about groundhopping in particular. Groundhoppers are a very interesting group to both sport and tourism industry. For the latter, groundhoppers might be a potential target group especially when it comes to the promotion and marketing of certain destinations. Just like other types of tourists, groundhoppers bring money to the destinations, spend it at different occasions and hence contribute to the destinations’ development. Having an exploratory character, this quantitative research wants to contribute to the lack in current literature, focussing on a German groundhopper online community and its members. A web-based questionnaire has been conducted which had a total number of 909 respondents. Demonstrating the outcomes of the survey, this thesis looks into the individual statistics of the questionnaire and visualises the answers with descriptive tables. Furthermore, with the use of an exploratory factor analysis and a two-step cluster analysis, three potential groups of groundhoppers could be explored. The findings from this study should be seen as a starting point, an inspiration for further research, as groundhopping is likely to keep growing in numbers. While quantitative studies like this thesis can contribute to get an overall picture, qualitative research will also be required to get an insight on the more individual and personal level of groundhopping. This again could lead to new ideas and concepts for advanced quantitative research. Until then, groundhopping will remain a mostly unknown niche in the field of sports tourism.