Study of the potential of football tourism : Research based on three football leagues: English, Spanish and Russian

This study is based on first-league football teams from England, Spain and Russia. It demonstrates that football tourism has a big potential because the attendance on football stadiums has a positive effect over the number of visitors in the city, and this influence is stronger among teams that are historically more popular. Football trips can also contribute to decreasing the seasonality and the centralization of tourism. The questionnaire designed for supporters demonstrates that a higher percentage of fans of currently less competitive teams tend to visit away games, but it is explained through the fact that more successful clubs have supporters located far away, for whom performing such a thing is more troublesome. English supporters spend less money in their football visiting trips, but their journeys are also shorter and without many activities, which makes their habits different from the ones of a typical tourist. At the same time, Spanish football tourists spend more time and money while travelling. The respondents from both countries face similar problems while visiting a match, and the majority of them are infrastructural. Russian football tourists spend the most time and money in their journeys, visiting many places except for the football match itself, which makes their behaviour the closest to a typical tourist. However, during matches they also suffer from more serious issues related to the unfriendliness of police and of hosts