Testing relationships between spectator’s motives and points of attachment in mixed martial arts in Poland

From the perspective of attendance and viewership, mix ed martial arts (MMA) rapidly became one of the most de man ded spectator sport in Poland [1,2]. Despite this popularity, MMA in some circles is still considered controversial, primarily due to an amount of sanctioned violence [3]. Further more, the reasons behind the attractiveness of MMA from the spectators’ perspective are scarce, especially in Europe. In this study, starting from the framework, which divides people attending sporting events to spectators and fans, we constructed a theoretical model of relations between motives and multiple points of attachment in MMA [4,5,6]. Next, it was tested on the data obtained at the MMA events. People attend sporting events in order to fulfil some social or psychological needs [7]. Therefore, motives like vicarious achie vement, aesthetics, socializing, escape, eustress are considered antecedent of sport consumption behaviours [7]. The concept closely related to motives is attachment to a specific sport object, used sometimes interchangeably with identification [8]. It was recognized that identification is not one-dimensional, as fans relate themselves to different entities involved in an event like a type of sport, its level, town, university, team, players, and coach [5,9,10]. Based on the framework of Sloan [4] and Fisher and Wake field [11], Trail et al. [5] developed models, where it was hypo the sized that motives would lead to stronger attachment [12]. In the Model C Trail et al. [5] separated motives to those espe cially relevant to spectators, who are foremost observers; fans, who are devoted to a team; and motives similarly important for both groups. Spectator Motives consisted of aesthetics, physical skill of the athletes, eustress (drama) and knowledge while Fan Motives reflected to vicarious achievement. Mo tives of escape and social interactions were assumed to be similarly relevant to both groups and were represented by the latent variable labelled as Overarching Motives [5]. The dime nsions of attachment were gathered under the two latent variables: Sport Identification (consisting of attachment to a level of sport and to a particular sport) and Organizational Identifi cation (involving attachment to a team, coach, community, uni versity and players). Spectator Motives were considered to predict the Sport Identification while vicarious achievement was directly linked to Organizational Identification [5,6,13]. We used Trail et al.’s [5] model as a framework to develop a research hypothesis. As the previous studies examining the relationships between points of attachment and motives were conducted in team sports, essential changes had to be made to adapt the model to the context of individual, combat sport [5,6,14].