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Essendon's Role In Professional Sports

Decent Essays

Having originally emerged in the late 1850s as means of keeping cricketers fit during winter (AFL 2017), Australian Football, or simply football, has grown to become the most popular spectated sport in Australia (Topend Sports 2013), with an average national attendance per game that places it as the fourth largest league in the world (Mitchell
2017). As of 2017, the Australian Football League (AFL), was comprised of 18 teams with
847 active players (AFL 2017). Although football was traditionally seen as a very working-class sport, the AFL’s rapid commercialization of the game in the mid to late
90s dramatically shifted its focus towards garnering commercial sponsors in order to financially support the transcendent reputation the organization …show more content…

Today, Essendon has a strong loyal following, with 67,768 registered memberships as of 2017 (Ralph 2017), and an estimated national fan base of over 1 million (Essendon FC 2017). In order to encourage supporter and follower engagement and interaction, Essendon, like every other professional sporting team, maintains a strong social media presence across multiple media channels such as Facebook,
Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter (Essendon FC 2017). This intimate access to
Essendon’s story allows for potentially millions of supports, followers and fans alike to feel as though they have been part of the team’s journey to where they are now and where they may potentially end up (Clapp 2017).
One of Essendon’s fastest growing and most popular social media channels amongst fans, is Instagram. With 2,074 posts and an estimated 131,000 followers to date,
Essendon Football Club’s Instagram is the third most followed club in the Australian
Football League, after Collingwood and Hawthorn (Shunt 2017). Although Instagram has a far smaller userbase when compared to Facebook, the social media channel …show more content…

This psychological phenomenon of a fan Basking in Reflected Glory, or BIRGing for short, post-win is heavily rooted in social identity theory, which aims to explain how a person’s self-esteem can be enhanced by identifying themselves with another person’s success
(Stavros et al. 2015, p. 459). The effect is further exacerbated by Essendon FC by routinely posting 1- 2 celebratory posts, after a winning game (See Exhibit A), but failing to post anything directly after a loss. Conversely, this phenomenon is called Cutting Off
Reflected Failures, or CORFing for short; and is regularly employed by many sports social media channels in order to manage and counter any threats to their fan’s self-esteem
(Stavros et al. 2015, p. 464).
Exhibit A – Example of BIRGing during post-game celebrations.
When analyzing the communication mediums used on Instagram, it is evident in Table 3 that the forms which attract the greatest follower engagement on average, are photos and quotes. Receiving almost twice as many likes as video content, this high level

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