Measuring and achieving service quality for youth football academies in China: a perspective from players

As football in China has witnessed unprecedented enthusiasm with the great determination from the government to reverse the weak performance and poor image in world football, capitalising on the promotion of youth football has seen a proliferation of both domestic and foreign youth football academies for the past decade. Against this background of rapid development of youth football, players’ perceived service quality and their level of satisfaction has become an essential part of business practice among youth football academies. Besides, whether the country-of-origin’s (COO) moderating effect exists influencing players’ service quality evaluation in determining their overall satisfaction among two types of academies (local-oriented vs. overseas-oriented) or not has yet to be examined.

In attempt to address these problems, the thorough review of extant literature led to the development of a theoretically grounded and hierarchical model for measuring service quality and its consequent constructs including satisfaction and membership renewal intention. Firstly, the measurement model was tested through a systematic scale development process. Secondly, the structural equation modelling technique was employed to examine the relationships among service quality dimensions, overall satisfaction, and membership renewal intention. Lastly, a multigroup invariance analysis was conducted to investigate the COO’s moderating effect on the paths from service quality to players’ satisfaction.

Data were collected twice from youth football players who have been received football training for over six months in two types of youth football academies in south-eastern China. The first dataset was used for Study 1 and 2 and the results revealed that a three-level service quality measurement model was confirmed, with 46 items retained under nine service quality sub-dimensions, which in turn support four primary dimensions. In Study 3, the second dataset was employed to test the hypothetical relationships and the COO’s moderating effect on the relationships in the structural model. Six out of nine service quality dimensions positively influenced overall satisfaction. The relationship between satisfaction and membership renewal intention was positively related as well. In addition, the findings of the multigroup moderating analysis indicated that two paths from range of programme to satisfaction and from employee performance to satisfaction were moderated by COO. Theoretically, this thesis advances the understanding of service quality in youth football training industry and empirically contributes to multidisciplinary literature on the paths among perceived service quality, overall satisfaction, and behavioural intention. Practically, the present study provides strategic implications for practitioners in measuring, managing, and improving service quality in their academies.