Determinants of Adoption by Professional Football Coaches in a Developing Economy: Evidence from Ghana

Abstract

The study investigates the Influence of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions and behavioural intentions on professional football coaches’ adoption of Sports Analytics Apps in developing countries. Studies on adoption of Sports Analytics Apps have so far focused more on issues relating to usage behaviour, deployment and diffusion. However, there still remains striking factors of Sports Analytics Apps adoption such as social influence, facilitating conditions and the relationship between behavioural intention and usage behaviour that have not been explored by extant researchers. To address these gaps in knowledge, this study investigated professional football coaches in Ghana using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as the theoretical lens and the qualitative method approach as the research methodology. The study employs the use of many sampling techniques: convenience sampling, purposive sampling, snowballing sampling and structural sampling in arriving at the final respondents for the thesis. In total, seven professional football coaches were sampled consisting of two females and five males. The study utilized the thematic analysis and further grouped the interview data collected from the respondents, transcribed and carefully read over and over in order to take notes of key views expressed by respondent and how they reflect on the key themes in the research questions. The result of the study shows that there was no support for the influence of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating condition on behavioural intention. However, behavioural intention seemed to have influenced usage behaviour. The study also reports on non-moderating effects of gender, age, and experience on the various constructs of the model adopted for the study. In view of this, the study recommends that the Ghana Football Association (GFA) should adequately invest in organizing free trial services for potential adopters and help develop measures that will help educate professional football Coaches on the benefits that can be derived from the usage of Sports Analytics Apps. This research contributes to, arguably, the limited literature in the area of Sports Analytics adoption through a multi-faceted and multidimensional perspective from a developing country. It is hoped that it would serve as a stepping stone for subsequent studies in the field. It further responds to the research gaps considering the fact that arguably, not many empirical studies have been done from a developing economy context. Finally, the study calls for future researchers to use the UTAUT model in studying the adoption of Sports Analytics Apps as a learning tool by football supporters. Likewise, the investigation suggests that future research should analyse variables that can potentially Influence the appropriation of pool of cloud based Sports Analytics Apps by proficient football coaches.