Insights from Football Stadiums as Tourist Destinations Using Online User Reviews

Over the past 20 years, trends in the construction or renovation of football stadiums have undergone rapid transformation. Simple sports venues are constantly evolving into multifunctional facilities and play a decisive role in shaping cities’ image. To date, significant emphasis has been placed on developing stadiums as venues for sporting events, with a focus on supply-side perspectives, particularly in relation to design, marketing, and sustainability. However, we know relatively little about how the direct consumers of this product, the visitors to these facilities, experience and perceive these infrastructures, especially outside of match days. This paper follows a framework for researching this perspective, focusing on the services provided as key points of interest in stadium tourism, and on the written reactions on social networks. This framework is implemented by employing a set of well-known single-word themes, matching each review to these themes, and finally measuring the sentiment of the collected short texts as an implicit indicator of sentiment on the studied themes. Its realization is based on natural language processing, semantic similarity analysis, and sentiment evaluation to identify dominant themes, recurring lexical patterns, and emotional tones in visitor comments. The study concerns thirteen major European stadiums and reviews posted on Google and TripAdvisor. The research findings highlight the themes that shape a unique tourist experience, capturing tourist interests in stadium tourism in the post-COVID-19 era. Finally, the individual evaluation of the themes provides practical and clear tools for stadium managers, tourism operators, destination managers and legislators who seek to maximize visitor engagement and multiply the overall socio-economic value of these iconic infrastructures for the benefit of the wider urban environment that hosts them.