The Emerging Social Media Water Cooler? Motivations for Reddit Use in a Niche League

Abstract

Social media play a key role in sport marketing—with athletes, teams, and leagues directly engaging with their audiences. While Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have received much attention in the sport marketing and communication literature, research on Reddit is scant. This is particularly noteworthy, as the platform is growing rapidly and promises utility for users with nonmainstream interests to find and engage with each other. This study employs a uses and gratifications approach to investigate how prevalent Reddit use is among fans of the United Football League (UFL), what motivates users to engage with the platform, and whether Reddit use leads to increased team identification. Findings indicate a high rate of Reddit use among sports fans, driven by a combination of six distinct motivations, leading to increased identification with their favorite team.

Keywords

Reddit team identification uses and gratifications United Football League niche sports

Introduction

American football is the most popular sport in the United States. In total, 41% of U.S. adults named it their favorite to watch (Jones, 2024), and 53% called it “America's Sport” (Gramlich et al., 2024). Cementing this notion, consumers watched 975 billion broadcast minutes of National Football League (NFL) content between November 2022 and November 2023—almost three times as much as the next-best competitor, Major League Baseball.

Despite the high demand for the sport, the NFL remains the only sustainable professional American football league in the United States. Outside of college football, several entities have tried to capitalize on the anticipated consumer demand for American football during the NFL offseason but ultimately failed. The most recent attempt at spring football is the United Football League (UFL), created in March 2024 through the merger of the rejuvenated XFL and the United States Football League (USFL; Seifert, 2023). The UFL currently consists of eight teams across the American South and Midwest, with plans to expand in 2027. Though the league reported revenue and television (TV) viewership exceeding expectations following their inaugural season (UFL Concludes, 2024), figures remained low compared to NFL and college football standards. Though the UFL has gained momentum nationally, with some of its games attracting more viewers on ESPN than regular-season National Hockey League (NHL) games, the vitality of the local markets varies widely (Fischer, 2025). Teams averaged 12,828 fans per game in 2024, which was largely driven by the St. Louis Battlehawks (34,365 per game). Six out of the remaining seven teams attracted 10,000 or fewer fans on average (Fischer, 2024). In 2025, UFL's in-person attendance was down by 5%, with only one team (Michigan) seeing an increase. Even TV viewership was down by 20% (Florio, 2025). “From a business standpoint, [we need] more butts in seats, greater attendance across the board,” said UFL President and CEO Russ Brandon in an interview (Fischer, 2025), as the league attempts to enlist local investors in an owner–operator arrangement.

But how can local interest in teams and subsequent attendance be increased? One of the main mechanisms identified in previous research is team identification, the “extent to which a fan feels a psychological connection to a team and the team's performances are viewed as self-relevant” (Wann, 2006, p. 475). Highly identified fans have been shown to exhibit consistent and enduring attitudes and behaviors toward their favorite teams, especially when it comes to ticket purchases and game attendance (Fisher & Wakefield, 1998; Murrell & Dietz, 1992). To create highly engaged fans, however, requires more than sheer exposure via national TV. Social aspects—such as connecting with other fans—have been found to be most relevant for new teams, especially in niche or small mass markets (Boehmer, 2025; Grant et al., 2011; Lock et al., 2011).

Although these connections traditionally form in and around the stadium, social media platforms promise a supplemental or substitutional place of connection for sport fans. While Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have received considerable attention in sport communication research and practice (Wenner, 2014), few studies have addressed how sport fans use Reddit. This represents a noteworthy gap in our understanding of fan behavior, as the community-moderated content aggregation site receives the fifth-most web traffic in the United States (Similarweb, 2025), trailing only Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon. Sport is also one of the more popular topics on Reddit, with the subreddit¹ r/sports having accumulated more than 22 million members. The subreddits for the NBA (15 million) and NFL (12 million) also rank among the top 1% in membership. Despite this interest, however, not much is known about how fans of small sports brands create and consume content on the platform. As such, establishing a better understanding of the prevalence and nature of Reddit use among sports fans furthers our theoretical and practical understanding of fans’ media consumption habits, closing a gap in existing research and potentially enabling marketing professionals to create successful marketing strategies engaging their audiences and facilitating sustainable franchise development.

To do so, the goal of this paper is threefold. First, we establish a baseline for how prevalent Reddit use is among fans of a niche league. Second, we explore motivations among UFL fans to use Reddit employing a uses and gratifications approach. Third, we test the potential relationship between Reddit use and team identification, and whether the underlying motivations affect the frequency with which the platform is used.

Literature Review

Describing American football as “niche” seems counterintuitive (at least in the United States). Looking at the UFL, however, the league fits several criteria traditionally used by scholars to define leagues outside the mainstream. It does not represent the highest level of play in its sport, garners less media attention, exhibits weaker finances, and generally achieves lower attendance from a smaller fan-base (Greenhalgh et al., 2021; Mahoney et al., 2013). Though this dichotomy is somewhat crude and may lead to an oversimplification, equating “small” with “niche” (Fujak et al., 2024), it stands to reason that the UFL as a league—not American football as a sport—exhibits characteristics that would traditionally be used to identify niche brands in marketing, strategy, and consumer behavior. These include elevated consumer loyalty (e.g., a small but highly engaged group of fans) and providing a service that meets a specialized customer need (e.g., football during the spring). For example, data gathered during this study reveals a negative relationship between following the NFL and identification with an UFL franchise, hinting at a small but distinct audience for the UFL. In addition, 70%–80% of UFL fans live more than 75 miles away from their favorite team, with those visiting the stadium traveling a median distance of 300 miles, which is significantly greater than the 165 miles reported for NFL fans (“Sports diaspora,” 2017), indicating high behavioral commitment for those identifying with a team.

Assuming a niche status of the UFL, the league faces unique challenges to gain market share (Greenhalgh et al., 2011). More specifically, the UFL needs to develop marketing strategies focused on highlighting product quality and improving customer relationships (Barney, 1991; Toften & Hammervoll, 2009). To do so, implementing highly targeted and direct forms of marketing and advertising, such as word-of-mouth (Toften & Hammervoll, 2013), or directly engaging with (potential) consumers to increase identification, have been suggested.

In this context, Reddit provides a promising environment. The community-moderated content aggregation site has emerged as a popular destination for the discussion of news, sport, and entertainment. Founded in 2005, Reddit's monthly active user base has grown by more than 48% since 2022, hitting 97 million in January 2025 (Backlinko, 2025). The company also recorded its first profitable quarter in 2024, 6 months after the release of its initial public offering (Roth, 2024). Critically, this growth comes at a time when rival X (formerly Twitter) is projected to lose millions of users (Binder, 2024) and TikTok faces skepticism and even possible shutdown in the United States, amid concerns about data security and its parent company's Chinese ownership (Yilek, 2025).

In addition to its continued growth, Reddit is distinct from other social media platforms due to its topic-oriented subreddit structure (allowing for immersion in a particular topic without having to rely on algorithmic curation; think: X exclusively for individual sports or teams), and its reliance on community moderation of aggregated content. Users can comment under every post, often creating prolonged threads, and “upvote” or “downvote” each topic, giving it more prominence on the site. In addition, each subreddit has users that enforce community standards for discussion, a process that has been generally received well by Reddit users, with some complaints about the abuse of power by some moderators, and other moderators quitting due to the challenge of the role (Schöpke-Gonzalez et al., 2024). Reddit's traditionally disorganized interface and noteworthy commitment to free speech attracted enthusiastic fans, but also critics (Massanari, 2017) for creating a culture that can feel threatening to users, particularly in marginalized communities (Thach et al., 2024). However, a commitment to more strictly enforced community-based moderation, along with struggles among its industry peers, has combined to give Reddit more mainstream appeal (Stewart, 2024). In addition, Reddit is often seen as a place where content and community take precedence over celebrities or corporate interests. Instead of relatively short self-presentations, Reddit users mainly share content from other sources, often compiling long posts expressing detailed ideas and encouraging longer, potentially higher-quality discussions (Bonifazi et al., 2023). Finally, given that redditors do not need to (and most do not) provide their real name, the quality of the comment seemingly plays a much larger role in its reception, as opposed to who its author is.

From a niche marketing perspective, then, Reddit offers the potential for direct engagement with a highly engaged audience. For example, the subreddit r/UnitedFootballLeague has 12,000 members, with subreddits of individual teams ranging from several hundred to more than 15,000 members (as of March 2025). Most of these subreddits provide content even in the offseason, indicating a relatively small but active community. At the same time, sport-related content is frequently promoted to the Reddit front page, making it visible to audiences beyond particular teams, leagues, or sports, affording global exposure (O’Hallarn et al., 2023).

Reddit and Sport

Given the outsized impact of social media on modern society, its many intersections with sport are intuitive and understandable. This has resulted in a plethora of scholarship exploring the relationship between social media and sport (Filo et al., 2015; Pegoraro, 2010; many others). There is a noteworthy shortfall of scholarship, however, examining the relationship between sport and Reddit. While sport organizations have been closely monitoring discussions among communities of interest connected to their organization, league, or sport for some time (Boehmer et al., 2025), sport scholars are only slowly increasing their focus on Reddit. When compared to industry peers Facebook, Twitter (now X), and Instagram, this represents a shortcoming by sport media and management scholars, especially at a time when the popularity of the platform is growing. Exploring how and why a growing number of sport fans uses Reddit promises to extend our understanding of overall sport media consumption motivations and patterns. However, even though there has been an uptick in research using Reddit data over the past decade, much of this work has been conducted in computer science disciplines focusing less on the underlying user motivations and outcomes, but more on the mechanics and dynamics of the platform. For example, researchers have investigated what makes posts popular (Mendelsohn & Li, 2017), how users collectively grieve (Bingaman, 2022), and how their conflicts play out (Aswath et al., 2020). At the same time, an analysis by Proferes et al. (2021) of all peer-reviewed Reddit scholarship between 2010 and 2020 found only two studies using Reddit data under the topic heading “sports and games.” Even the 5 years since have seen a relative paucity of Reddit and sport scholarship, with some broader approaches only slowly appearing. In 2025, for example, a health-focused study looked at redditors posting about physical activity, assigning discussion topics to the collective discourse (Shmueli-Scheuer et al., 2025). The effect of Reddit comments on other users has also received some scholarly attention, such as female sportswriters being subjected to abuse from users of the platform (Peterson, 2019) and how the popularity of some posts on the site affects the visibility of contrary views following the creation of dominant narratives (O’Hallarn et al., 2023).

However, given the lack of dedicated research on how sport fans incorporate Reddit as part of their sport media consumption routines, the first step of this study is to investigate how prevalent Reddit use is in the realm of niche sport fans—and more particularly the UFL. Furthering our understanding of where the platform ranks in terms of usage frequency compared to other, more established social media, is an important step in establishing the importance of Reddit in the overall sport marketing and communications space and might help aid future research efforts and increase awareness of the platform among practitioners. Therefore, we ask:

RQ1: How prevalent is Reddit use among fans of the UFL?

Motivations to Use Reddit

One of the key ambitions for both media scholars and practitioners is to understand why individuals use certain media. For scholars, understanding why people choose a specific platform and the needs it fulfills creates a more nuanced understanding of media consumption and its impact. For practitioners, knowing their audience's motivations can help them create more impactful messages, meeting potential consumers’ needs.

The uses and gratifications approach (Katz et al., 1973) aims at uncovering these needs. The framework sees the user as actively choosing media to satisfy specific needs, rather than focusing on what media does to consumers (Ruggiero, 2000). More specifically, users are ascribed motivated and goal-oriented behavior, which is driven by individual social and psychological factors. Furthermore, the uses and gratifications approach assumes that consumers can articulate these underlying reasons. Over time, uses and gratifications approaches have been used to investigate the underlying motivations for both traditional (e.g., Rubin, 2009) and new/social media (e.g., Dolan et al., 2016; Parker & Plank, 2000).

Reddit is no exception. Employing a uses and gratifications framework, several factors have been identified to drive usage, including informativeness, socializing or community building, status-seeking, and entertainment (Moore & Chunag, 2017). Other research has found that users aim to obtain information and avoid irrelevant information or spam through use of the platform (Wicaksana & Candrasari, 2023). Generally, content on Reddit has been perceived as being up-to-date and easily accessible, readable, and understandable, adding to the informational allure of the site (Scheibe & Zimmer, 2020). Examination of the “social TV” phenomenon connected to Reddit found a desire by users to obtain back stories and expand their knowledge (e.g., information seeking), as well as to share inside jokes with their fan community (e.g., entertainment). The collective output of this activity, Unkel and Kümpel (2020) found, was the feeling of a shared viewing experience with social gratifications connected to it (e.g., community). This community focus can also be found in research by Massanari (2015), who examined the tendency toward play among Reddit users, who engage in whimsical patterns of interactions, sharing memes and earning “karma” from fellow redditors for clever content. Other scholarship has found that users employ the site's open commons, sharing, and upvoting/downvoting apparatus to bypass the traditional gatekeeping function of legacy news media (Bogers & Nordenhoff Wernersen, 2014).

There is considerable overlap between these Reddit-specific motivations and those found in research employing a uses and gratifications lens to study other social media platforms. For example, information seeking, entertainment, and social interaction have been found to underlie many engagement behaviors across different social media (Dolan et al., 2016; Whiting & Williams, 2013). At the same time, though, considerable differences exist across platforms—especially when it comes to how important different motivations are in driving usage patterns (Gan & Wang, 2015; Pelletier et al., 2020; Quan-Haase & Young, 2010).

Motivations to Consume Sport

In addition to the uses and gratifications underlying different (social) media, individuals also have varying reasons for why they consume sport. Rooted in the sport sociology literature (e.g., Sloan, 1989; Zillmann et al., 1989; Zillmann & Paulus, 1993) and investigations of sport fan motivations (e.g., Milne & McDonald, 1999; Wann, 1995), Trail et al. (2000) established nine motives that—with some variation—found acceptance in the literature. These are: achievement, acquisition of knowledge, aesthetics, drama/eustress, escape, family, physical attractiveness of participants, the quality of the physical skill of the participants, and social interaction.

On social media, these traditional consumption motives are often supplemented by users’ desire to directly interact with their favorite teams and athletes, mixing the uses and gratifications of general social media use with those of sport fandom and sport media consumption. For example, while the need for information and entertainment was still prevalent among sport fans on social media, the ability to engage socially with other fans or even players, feeling empowered, and expressing emotions such as passion, hope, esteem, and camaraderie played important roles in determining social media use across platforms (e.g., Stavros et al., 2014; Vale & Fernandes, 2018). Seo and Green (2008) summarized the main motivations of sport fans using online media as: information, entertainment, interpersonal communication, escape, pass time, fanship, team support, fan expression, economic, and technical knowledge.

However, even though a considerable corpus of research exists on both the motivations to use social media and to consume sport, it has not been investigated how these apply at the intersection of Reddit and sport. While some of the motivations are likely to overlap, past research indicates that specific motives—and their prevalence—differ depending on the nature of the (social media) platform and the topical context (e.g., sport, news). To establish a more detailed understanding of why sport fans use Reddit, we ask the following research question:

RQ2: What motivates fans of the UFL to use Reddit?

Team Identification and Media Use

Team identification is one of the most researched constructs in the study of sport consumers. Individuals’ psychological connection to a team, whereas the team's performance becomes central to the individual, has been used to explain a large variety of behaviors, ranging from affective, to behavioral and psychological (see Wann, 2006). Of particular interest to the present study is its relationship with sport media consumption, as it provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the underlying motivations and gratifications (Raney, 2006).

Even though the exact nature of the relationship between team identification and sport media consumption—and especially its causal direction—is still being debated, a long line of research has established a firm positive correlation in several key areas, including in-person attendance, media consumption, merchandise purchases, and word-of-mouth (Lee et al., 2025). For example, minor league baseball fans who consumed more online content were more likely to identify with their team, which led to increased game attendance (Williams et al., 2012). Similarly, highly identified fans were more likely to consume sport via different media (Devlin & Brown-Devlin, 2017; Fisher, 1998) and engage in second-screen usage (Cunningham & Eastin, 2015). Other studies have found that team identification can predict the use of certain social media platforms (Haugh & Watkins, 2016). As a result, these platforms have long been highlighted as an effective tool for sport organizations to engage with fans, with the potential for directly increasing team identification (Meng et al., 2015; Park & Dittmore, 2014). What makes social media—and particularly Reddit—a potentially powerful tool in increasing team identification is the fact that it facilitates social connections. More specifically, research has shown that it is not the time spent with the team's content that drives team identification, but rather the degree to which fans interact with other community members (MacIntosh et al., 2017). Based on this evidence from past research, we hypothesize that:

H1: Reddit use will be positively related to team identification. Individuals reporting more frequent use of Reddit will also report higher levels of team identification.

Although the generally positive relationship between team identification and media consumption has been firmly established, the interrelations between different levels of team identification, motivations to use Reddit, and the frequency of using the platform have not been explored. A reasonable argument could be made, though, that not all motivations predict usage equally. For example, research on sport news sharing on Twitter revealed that source, content, and user characteristics affected behavioral intentions differently—with interest and informativeness playing crucial roles (Boehmer & Tandoc, 2015). At the same time, content preferences and motivations might also depend on users’ level of team identification. For example, highly identified fans have been found to evaluate mainstream content more favorably, whereas less identified fans preferred user-generated content (Kwak et al., 2010). Given the lack of concrete evidence on the relationship between different motivations to use Reddit, team identification, and usage frequency, we pose our final research question:

RQ3: How do (a) team identification and (b) usage motivations affect Reddit use?

Methods

To ensure the representativeness of the sample, participants were recruited via the online survey platform Prolific, a frequently used subject pool for online experiments and surveys that produces reliable results in social scientific research (Douglas et al., 2023; Palan & Schitter, 2018). As no filter for directly recruiting UFL fans existed, a two-step process was employed to enlist participants. First, a prescreener was launched within the Prolific environment and distributed to 5,000 randomly selected users. The three-question survey asked whether participants identified with one of the UFL franchises, even just a little bit (as suggested for analyses involving team identification; James et al., 2019), whether they had consumed any UFL-related content within the past 6 months, and whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement that they actively followed the UFL. Participants received $0.20 for their participation, independent of their responses. In total, 2,008 participants met the criteria and were invited to participate in the main survey. A total of 1,201 users completed all questions and received $5 for their participation. This payment aligns with the ethical standards recommended by Prolific as it equates to an hourly rate of at least $12 (assuming a maximum completion time of 25 min). On average, participants took 15 min to complete all questions. Participants who failed at least one of the two implemented attention checks (26), took fewer than 5 min to complete the entire survey (9), and those who showed signs of nondifferentiation behavior for any of the relevant scales (13) were removed from analysis. In addition, all textual responses to open-ended questions were screened for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) via the university's AI detection software. Twenty-five responses were flagged by the software and excluded upon manual inspection due to a high likelihood of nonhuman authors. This was deemed necessary as AI-generated responses are likely to reflect existing notions about social media usage motivations and therefore could skew the results. The final sample consists of 1,125 responses.

The final sample was predominately male (64.5%) with an average age of 40 years, mirroring notions about the relevant demographic composition of American football fans in the United States, which tends to skew male and older (Statista, 2024). The majority had completed at least a 4-year college degree (66.4%) and reported an annual household income of $100,000 or above (40.7%), which is higher than census data would indicate (see Table 1). Fans of all eight current UFL franchises were represented, with the D.C. Defenders (20.6%), Michigan Panthers (16.9%), and St. Louis Battlehawks (15.6%) having the largest following in the sample.

Table 1.

Overview of Participant Demographics.

	n	%
Gender
Male	727	64.5
Female	358	31.7
Nonbinary	7	0.6
Prefer not to say	36	3.2
Education
Less than high school	2	0.2
High school graduate	79	7.0
Some college	197	17.5
2-year degree	101	9.0
4-year degree	514	45.6
Professional degree	211	18.7
Doctorate	24	2.1
Income
Less than $10,000	21	1.9
$10,000–19,999	28	2.5
$20,000–29,999	42	3.7
$30,000–39,999	52	4.6
$40,000–49,999	74	6.6
$50,000–59,999	100	8.9
$60,000–69,999	81	7.2
$70,000–79,999	114	10.1
$80,000–89,999	66	5.9
$90,000–99,999	88	7.8
More than $100,000	458	40.7
Personal connection to team
Yes	80	7.1
No	1,048	92.9

Reddit Use

To assess the use of Reddit among UFL fans, we asked participants to indicate how frequently they use different social media to consume both sport- and team-related content. For both, participants were asked to indicate their use of eight different platforms on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from “never” to “multiple times per day,” with higher scores indicating more frequent use. In addition to Reddit, the list of platforms included Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, and YouTube (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Social Media Platforms Used to Consume Sport and Team-Related Content.

Platform	% Sport-Related Usage	% Team-Related Usage
YouTube	78.5	69.8
Facebook	63.2	54.2
Twitter/X	62.5	54.8
Instagram	60.6	53.3
Reddit	57.1	44.0
TikTok	39.7	33.4
Twitch	18.3	15.0
SnapChat	21.0	14.4

Motivations to Use Reddit

To allow motivations to emerge freely and not be constrained by previous scales or constructs, we asked participants to verbalize their reasons for using Reddit in the context of sport. More specifically, participants who indicated using Reddit at least “once a week” in the sport media use question (n = 642; see above) were prompted to explain their use in more detail by responding to the following open-ended question: “Please describe in your own words why you use Reddit in the context of sport.” This approach has been successfully used to elicit user motivations in prior sport-related research (Boehmer & Tandoc, 2015) and is in line with methods used to elicit motivations in some of the most fundamental uses and gratifications research (Herzog, 1941). In this study, a total of 634 responses (98.7% response rate) were recorded, ranging from 15 to 2,013 characters.

Team Identification

To assess participants’ level of team identification, the revised version of the Sport Spectator Identification Scale (SSIS-R) was used. Despite some recent criticism regarding its ability to capture high identification levels (Tsigilis et al., 2023) and the need to align measures more closely with the theoretical foundation of team identification (Lock & Heere, 2017), the SSIS-R remains the most widely validated scale assessing the construct. It has been successfully employed across different sports, leagues, countries, and languages (Clarke et al., 2024), which provides the highest likelihood of producing reliable and valid results in the novel context of this study. The SSIS-R consists of a single factor and is comprised of seven questions, all assessed on an 8-point Likert-type scale ranging from “little important” to “very important.” Depending on participants’ stated affiliation with a UFL team, the name of that team was automatically imputed into the question. For example, for fans of the D.C. Defenders, a sample question read: “How important is it to you that the D.C. Defenders win?” All items were combined to form a single index of team identification (α = .95).

Control Variables

To isolate the effect of team identification and Reddit use motivations, several potentially confounding factors were included in the analysis. In addition to demographic variables (e.g., age, gender, income, education), which have consistently shown to affect sport-related attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Wann et al., 2004), two additional sports-related variables were included. More specifically, past research has shown that having a personal connection to a team and following a team over a longer period might affect team identification, especially in the niche context (Boehmer, 2025). To control for the impact of these factors, participants were asked to indicate whether they had a personal connection to the team (yes = 1, no = 0), and since when they followed the UFL team they identified with. In addition, prior research has established a strong link between brand associations and team identification. Brand associations are all perceptions, characteristics, or thoughts about a brand a user holds in memory. In the realm of sport these include the physical characteristics of a team (e.g., brand mark, facilities), it's history and tradition (e.g., rituals, rivalries), how the game is played (e.g., style of play, star players, success), and the psychological benefits fans receive (e.g., social interaction, group experience, escape). To measure brand associations, an expanded version of the communal brand associations scale (Wear et al., 2018; Wear & Heere, 2020) was employed. It includes 35 items on a 7-point Likert-type scale (α = .95) and has been shown to reliably capture brand association in the niche sport context (Boehmer, 2025). See Table 1 and Table 3 for descriptive statistics of key variables included in the analysis.

Table 3.

Descriptive Statistics of Key Variables.

Variable	Mean	SD	Alpha
Team Identification	4.04	1.73	.95
Brand Associations	4.94	0.83	.95
Sport Media Consumption	4.40	1.27
Years Followed Team	3.02	1.58

Analysis

The current study employed a two-step text-based analysis that combined AI-assisted qualitative analysis with human verification and quantitative content analysis.

Qualitative Analysis

A growing stream of literature has explored the uses of AI in academic research. Especially following the public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, scientists have enlisted the assistance of large-language models (LLMs) for a range of tasks, including conceptualizing ideas, summarizing scientific literature, generating analytic code, and writing up entire manuscripts (Hutson, 2022). Although limitations exist in how AI can and should support research (Nature, 2023), LLMs have proven useful in the qualitative analysis of large amounts of textual information (Brilliantova et al., 2025). This is particularly true for developing inductive coding schemes emerging directly from the data (Bijker et al., 2024), where themes identified by ChatGPT overlapped significantly with those of human coders (Wachinger et al., 2025). More specifically, although ChatGPT is most successful at producing concrete, descriptive themes (Morgan, 2023), it was also able to identify nuanced dynamics and to “propose a codebook and key quotes from the transcript which had considerable face validity” (Wachinger et al., 2025, p. 1). Following the suggested best practices from the abovementioned literature, we used human coders to verify the emerging themes and subsequently code the data into the developed categories (Brilliantova et al., 2025). More specifically, we prompted the university-hosted GPT-4o version to take a constant comparative approach that allowed patterns to emerge from the data (Tracy, 2024). The first stage was the open-coding phase, where the model was asked to engage in a preliminary “soak” in the data before proceeding with line-by-line coding (Saldana, 2025). Consistent with the constant-comparative approach (Glaser, 1965; Glaser & Strauss, 2017), the model was prompted to compare each response with the preceding response for codes to emerge. The model was then instructed to use axial coding to link individual codes under unifying conceptual bins (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017). Once the categories were fully developed, ChatGPT was instructed to construct narratives around them to distinguish each category clearly—including example responses from participants.² Once the categories had been established by AI, one researcher who had not been involved in the AI coding process immersed himself in the data, engaging in the outlined constant-comparative approach to establish an independent set of categories to verify the AI-suggested themes. The five AI-suggested themes were substantiated, with one additional theme emerging from the human verification process (see categories below).

Quantitative Analysis

The categories established during the qualitative analysis were then used to code all responses using quantitative content analysis (Riffe et al., 2023). A participant's response served as the unit of analysis and could include multiple motivations for using Reddit. To determine the reliability of the coding manual developed based on the emerging categories, two coders familiarized themselves with the definitions of the categories and coded 10% of the data. Krippendorff's alpha, Cohen's kappa, and Scott's pi were calculated for all coded variables (Riffe et al., 2023). Reliability for the six motivational categories ranged from .84 to 1 (see Table 4) and therefore met the standards of acceptable reliability (Riffe et al., 2023). After reliability had been established, one researcher coded the remainder of the sample.

Table 4.

Reddit Motivations: Distribution and Reliability.

Factor	% in Sample	n	Scott's pi	Krippendorff's Alpha	Cohen's Kappa
Information seeking	58.9	374	.88	.88	.88
Community and social interaction	41.1	261	.94	.94	.94
Platform utility/affordances	23.9	152	1	1	1
Providing and seeking opinions	23.5	149	.84	.84	.84
Entertainment	15.9	101	.91	.91	.91
Betting	4.1	26	1	1	1

To test whether Reddit use is positively related to team identification (H1), we computed an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model in the R Studio statistical software package (version 2023.12.1). Team identification (SSIS-R) was entered as the dependent variable, with Reddit use frequency as the main predictor while controlling for demographic and sport-related variables (see Table 5). To assess whether team identification and motivational factors affected Reddit use differently, a second OLS regression was computed with Reddit use frequency as the dependent variable. In addition to the motivational factors identified from participant responses, the model included demographic variables (age, gender, education, income) and sport-related variables (personal connection, years followed, team identification) for control (see Table 6).

Table 5.

Results of OLS Regression Model Predicting Team Identification.

	Estimate	SE	95% CI		p
	Estimate	SE	LL	UL	p
Intercept	−3.901	0.285	−4.460	−3.341
Age	0.005	0.002	0.001	0.009	.014
Gender: male	0.038	0.077	−0.113	0.188	.623
Education	0.097	0.031	0.036	0.158	.002
Income	−0.014	0.013	−0.039	0.011	.260
Years followed	0.178	0.024	0.132	0.225	<.001
Personal connection	0.589	0.138	0.318	0.859	<.001
Brand associations	1.343	0.045	1.255	1.431	<.001
Sport media consumption	0.014	0.030	−0.045	0.073	.638
Reddit use frequency	0.042	0.021	0.001	0.083	.044

Note. OLS = ordinary least squares; SE = standard error; CI = confidence interval; LL = lower limit; UL = upper limit.

Table 6.

Results of OLS Regression Predicting Frequency of Reddit Use.

	Estimate	SE	95% CI		p
	Estimate	SE	LL	UL	p
Intercept	3.283	0.345	2.607	3.96	<.001
Age	−0.014	0.006	−0.025	−0.003	.010
Gender: male	0.198	0.122	−0.042	0.437	.106
Education	0.047	0.049	−0.05	0.144	.345
Income	0.028	0.019	−0.01	0.066	.148
Years followed	−0.032	0.204	−0.432	0.369	.877
Personal connection	−0.028	0.037	−0.100	0.044	.440
Team identification	0.008	0.035	−0.061	0.076	.827
Information	0.407	0.124	0.164	0.651	.001
Community	0.593	0.118	0.361	0.826	<.001
Platform utility	0.350	0.149	0.058	0.642	.019
Opinion	−0.313	0.128	−0.563	−0.062	.015
Entertainment	0.426	0.127	0.177	0.675	<.001
Betting	0.325	0.281	−0.226	0.876	.247

Note. OLS = ordinary least squares; SE = standard error; CI = confidence interval; LL = lower limit; UL = upper limit.

Results

Investigating the prevalence of Reddit use among UFL fans (RQ1), we find that 57.1% of participants reported using Reddit to consume sports-related content at least once a week, and that 44% do so to access content about their favorite UFL team at any point during the year. Both are substantially higher than the 24% reportedly using the platform among the U.S. population (PEW, 2024). For sport-related usage, this puts Reddit in the same category as Facebook (63.2%), Instagram (62.5%), and Twitter (60.6%), despite those platforms receiving much greater attention by sport marketing practitioners and researchers. For team-related usage, Reddit lags a bit further behind, most likely due to fewer content being available (see Table 2).

Looking at the stated motivations of participants for using Reddit (RQ2), six distinct categories emerged from the qualitative analysis employing a constant-comparative approach.

Information Seeking

Participants referred to Reddit as a hub for sports fans to stay updated with scores, highlights, and breaking news. Users frequently mentioned seeking out game recaps, roster updates, and insider scoops on trades and team decisions. The ability to join subreddits focused solely on their favorite teams and having access to aggregated information were mentioned as important reasons for using the platform. To many users, Reddit acts as a sports news aggregator. Unlike traditional sports media, the platform centralizes information from multiple sources, often providing quicker access to injury updates, trade rumors, and live event reactions. One participant said, “Whenever there's a trade rumor, I come here first to see if anyone has inside info.” Another said, “I use Reddit for sports to stay updated on the latest news … and get unique insights and analysis from various perspectives.” Additionally, Reddit is seen as a great source for expert analysis. For example, one user said, “I like to get insights from people who know more than I do on the topic.” This category appears in 58.9% of responses.

Community and Social Interaction

Many respondents emphasized connecting with other fans who share their interests, especially via subreddits. Whether debating team performance following a game, reacting to breaking news, or sharing grievances, users value Reddit as a platform to connect with like-minded sports fans. The ability to experience collective emotions was mentioned as a driving factor in participation. To some, Reddit provides an almost therapeutic space to vent frustrations, celebrate victories, and process losses together. Whether through postgame rants, humorous coping mechanisms, or passionate debates, fans express their joy, anger, disappointment, and excitement in real time. A participant noted, “I like the community aspect of it.” Another explained: “It's nice being able to talk to other fans in real time through comments and chat.” A specific aspect that some users highlighted was that Reddit also afforded the opportunity to interact with sports personalities directly: “Occasionally, athletes, coaches, or sports personalities participate in AMAs on Reddit, where users can ask them questions directly. This provides a unique opportunity for fans to interact with their favorite sports figures,” another participant remarked. This category is present in 41.1% of responses.

Platform Affordances/Utility

Reddit's ease of use and structured format make it an efficient platform for sports content consumption. The ability to filter discussions, follow team-specific subreddits, and access a wide range of perspectives in one place enhances its appeal. Some users prefer Reddit not just for the content, but for the platform itself, as they perceive it as a centralized, algorithm-free, and user-controlled experience. Participants mentioned that they appreciate the platform's design as a centralized hub for diverse sports content, focusing on the ease of use of Reddit and the ability to find information quickly. As one participant stated: “I like how Reddit brings everything together—news, discussions, and highlights all in one place.” Another participant further highlighted that the design of the platform itself makes it appealing: “It's easier to follow sports on Reddit than on traditional websites. The upvote system makes it simple to find relevant info.” Another participant simply stated, “I like Reddit because it is easy to use,” while another participant said, “Reddit is my go-to for information. It's largely unfiltered and people upvote related content.” Another important aspect—especially in the social media space—is the perception that discussions on Reddit seem to be more substantial than on other social media platforms. One participant explained: “Reddit feels more like a community with active discussions. It's easier to express more complex ideas than on other social media sites.” Another noted: “I like the unbiased and anonymous posting format. It seems to be less filled with troll bots.” Lastly, one participant noted: “I enjoy the (slightly more) mature conversation as opposed to other social media.” In total, 23.9% of responses mention this category.

Providing and Seeking Opinions

In addition to seeking out information, participants also specifically highlight Reddit as a place to seek out and share opinions. More specifically, participants see Reddit as a place for exchanging insightful opinions and perspectives, offering their own predictions and explanations surrounding current events in sport. Fans appreciate the platform's authenticity, where they can both consume and contribute their opinion in a way that enriches their sports-following experience. One participant noted: “I love reading the comments on Reddit because I get a variety of different perspectives, and it fills the gap left by old forums I used to visit.” This type of use is mostly driven by the desire to seek out different perspectives on current events, helping users to make sense of issues in the realm of sport: “It's more interesting to get the thoughts and opinions of other fans than the same fake, recycled takes from sports pundits on television,” one participant explained. This category appears in 23.5% of comments.

Entertainment

Participants—to a lesser degree—referred to Reddit as a fun and engaging platform. Separate from the information and community aspects, participants highlighted that they use Reddit to be entertained and to view funny content. For example, one user said, “It is entertaining to read the comments and watch highlights.” Additionally, Reddit is perceived as a great place to find memes and other humorous content. For example, one user said, “I am a member of many subreddits for sports and teams, I like the memes and discussions.” Another user simply said, “I am here for the memes.” In total, 15.9% of the sample mention this category.

Sports Betting and Fantasy Sports

For a select few users, Reddit plays a role in sports betting or fantasy sports. Even though these users are also predominantly seeking information, this is distinct as this is not related to the sport they follow per se, but rather the application of this information in the context of betting or daily fantasy. Communities like r/sportsbook were mentioned to provide betting tips, while discussions about team performance, odds, and analytics help users make informed decisions. For example, one user said, “I use Reddit for fantasy sports advice and opinions.” Another user said, “I am a member of many different sports-related Reddit boards and use them to build my daily fantasy sports lineups.” This category is mentioned in 4.1% of comments.

Regression Results

Investigating the hypothesized positive relationship between Reddit use and team identification (H1), a significant model emerged (F = 154.614, df = 91,095, p < .001, R² = .56). As predicted, the more frequently participants used Reddit, the higher their reported team identification (β = .043, p = .044). In addition, age (β = .051, p = .014), education (β = .069, p = .002), brand associations (β = .647, p < .001), having a personal connection to the team (β = .087, p < .001), and the number of years having followed the team (β = .163, p < .001) emerged as significant positive predictors. In sum, the data underlying our analysis support the hypothesized positive relationship between Reddit use and team identification (see Table 5).

A second OLS regression model was calculated to investigate how the underlying motivations affected participants’ frequency of Reddit use (RQ3). A significant model emerged from the data (F = 5.674, df = 13,616, p < .001, R² = .11). Interestingly, from the included demographic (age, gender, education, income) and sport-related (years followed the team, personal connection, team identification) variables, only age (β = −.014, p = .01) emerged as a significant predictor, with older participants reporting less frequent use of Reddit. At the same time, all but one of the stated motivational categories emerged as significant predictors of Reddit use frequency, with “community & social interaction” (β = .593, p ≤ .001) and “platform utility” (β = .426, p ≤ .001) standing out as the biggest positive contributors, followed by “information seeking” (β = .407, p = .001) and “entertainment” (β = .350, p = .019). Interestingly, the “opinion” motivation showed to be a negative indicator of Reddit use (β = −.313, p = .015), with participants who indicated using Reddit to express and obtain opinions doing so less frequently. Only “betting” did not emerge as a significant predictor.

Taken together, the results of the regression analysis suggest that the desire to engage in social interactions with other community members is the strongest predictor of increased Reddit use, followed by the utility of the platform. At the same time, even though the ability to express and assess opinions was frequently mentioned as a reason to use Reddit, it turned out to be a negative predictor when it came to the frequency of using the site.

Discussion

First and foremost, we find that Reddit represents a significant destination for sport fans—especially those of teams competing in niche leagues. In total, 57.1% of UFL fans reported using Reddit, making it more popular than TikTok, a platform that has received considerable attention in recent years. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were used more frequently by participants, but not by much. As such, Reddit deserves more attention by both scholars and practitioners as a platform to engage potential consumers, especially in the niche context.

Looking at what motivates UFL fans to use the Reddit, six distinct themes emerged from the open-ended responses: information seeking, community and social interaction, platform utility and affordances, providing and seeking opinions, entertainment, and betting. Although these are largely in line with sport-motivated uses of other social media platforms, nuance exists. For example, with niche leagues lacking widespread and detailed coverage within mainstream media, UFL fans over-proportionally turn to Reddit to satisfy their informational needs. As one participant noted: “This is where I find up-to-date content that the mainstream media hasn’t published.” At the same time, entertainment plays a much smaller role than in other contexts.

Even more so, though, UFL fans flock to the platform to interact with others. The notion that social media can provide a virtual gathering place for groups of people interested in any topic, including sport, has been widely discussed in sport and social media scholarship (Rowe & Hutchins, 2013; Rubenking & Lewis, 2016; Smith & Smith, 2012). Although this can be said about most social media use, generating a common group identity is even more important in the niche context. Given the limited following of the UFL as a new league, and how geographically dispersed its teams are, fans embrace Reddit as a place to find likeminded individuals, create community, and even organize in-person meetings. “I like Reddit because you can interact with a niche population of people that enjoy the same thing as you,” remarked a participant. For niche sports and leagues, finding a more homogenous group of fans might be particularly valuable. For example, previous iterations of spring football leagues such as the original USFL and XFL have received negative commentary and even ridicule from mainstream media and fans of mainstream leagues for both their on-field performance and overall presentation (Forrest, 2023; Pearlman, 2018), potentially leading fans to seek out the “safe space” of a smaller, more aligned community. This is consistent with other sport and Reddit scholarship (Bingaman, 2022; O’Hallarn et al., 2023), suggesting that the appeal of the site is not necessarily that it represents an open commons for expressing any view, no matter how controversial. Instead, Reddit's platform affordances make it more likely to suppress dissenting opinions. As a result, expressing opinions might show up as a motivation to use the site, but only when those are in line with the group consensus, potentially explaining this study's finding that the desire to express opinions showed to be a negative predictor of usage frequency.

The biggest differentiator between Reddit and other social media platforms, however, is the perceived quality of discussions, confirming notions found in research on other topical contexts (Bonifazi et al., 2023). More specifically, it is not the desire to simply “shout” one's opinion into the social media sphere that motivates users, but rather the quality of discourse on the platform. In fact, participants motivated mainly by providing or seeking out opinion used Reddit less frequently, which is noteworthy given sport fans’ notoriety for unruly behavior online (Peterson, 2019). Instead, users praised the quality of information typically shared on Reddit. One fan noted: “I use it because there is a certain level of intelligence on Reddit, and I like interacting with educated fans. We don't speak negatively to one another, and we are strictly there to support the team.” Another participant highlighted: “Discussions tend to run deeper and more cogently than on Facebook/Instagram comments or X replies.”

But what makes Reddit a place for more nuanced discussion among sport fans? It seems like the affordances of Reddit play a large role in fans’ motivations to use the platform. “Users will upvote the best stuff,” one participant stated, while another said: “There is no algorithm that rewards sensational content. I feel it's more community oriented than an advertisement for the sports team compared to other sites.” In addition, comments focused on the ease of use of the Reddit interface and the ease of sharing content with others on the platform. For many respondents, Reddit is a tool. “The format is easy to follow and understand. And I get shown content that I might have missed,” said a participant. This represents a key inflection point in the consideration of motivations of Reddit users. Although the traditional uses and gratifications approach sees users as active participants, it does not (yet) explicitly acknowledge that users actively recognize the design of a media platform itself as a motivating factor for its use. This marks a logical progression, however, as sociotechnical design of online communities, an approach using insights from social science theories to inform online community design and management (Kraut & Resnick, 2012), has become increasingly popular. As such, our results hint at a full-circle moment, where the design choices made by the originators of a social media platform are explicitly acknowledged by its users as a main reason for engaging with the platform. For example, as Davis and Graham (2021) note, the difference between a unary show of support for user-generated content (such as a like or a heart) and a binary choice (upvotes and downvotes) which can affect the visibility of content on the site, incentivizes discourse of a greater utility. The byproduct is that a sizable percentage of participants are “expressively affected” (p. 13) by this real-time popularity contest, with positive feedback strongly predictive of future engagement with the platform. This focus on the (technical) utility of a platform, then, extends the traditional categories advanced under a uses and gratifications approach and resembles notions from platform theory (Parker et al., 2016), exploring how digital platforms facilitate interactions, transactions, and value creation between different user groups, or community of practice theory (Wenger, 1999), which states that learning and growth are facilitated by gathering individuals in a shared area of interest, or passion for a particular topic, allowing for knowledge to be co-created. How these theories integrate and best predict behavior, though, requires further investigation and could be taken on by future studies.

Finally, our results indicate that Reddit use is positively related to team identification. While team identification does not drive the frequency of Reddit use (confirming notions from previous research), we found that participants who use Reddit more frequently also report higher levels of fan identification. As such, the platform provides an opportunity for niche sport brands to foster a small but highly engaged audience if they present their content appropriately.

Conclusion

Reddit matters. Not only is the platform growing overall, but it also takes on a significant role in sport fans’ lives—especially in the niche context—driving team identification. As such, it might provide practitioners working for niche sports teams or leagues an opportunity to not only circumvent traditional media gatekeeping and disseminate their content in an environment that lends itself to more detailed discussions, but also to potentially facilitate more meaningful interactions among fans and therefore create greater team identification.

Those aiming to do so, however, need to consider the specific utility Reddit offers to users to guide how they conduct themselves on the platform. Even though several of the over-arching motivations to use Reddit that emerged from our data resemble those of other social media platforms, users also highlighted important differences that create a unique environment. As such, posting content designed for Instagram or Twitter—or any overly promotional content—is likely to lead to rejection. Redditors seek relevant, up-to-date information, accompanied by lively, largely informed discourse. An organization that joins the platform (many professional teams already have “official” Reddit accounts) can break news, share multimedia content, and validate the views of users who engage with their account, further incentivizing their participation (Davis & Graham, 2021). They would also benefit from directly liaising with existing users and moderators of the relevant subreddits to recognize the needs of their fans and to follow the rules of any particular platform when sharing content.

Limitations and Future Research

Even though the present research generated relevant insights into how and why UFL fans use Reddit, it is not without limitations. Despite purposefully selecting fans of the UFL and prompting them to think about their Reddit use as fans of their favorite UFL franchise, UFL content is likely to only make up a small portion of participants’ overall Reddit consumption. As such, for some users encountering UFL content might—at least initially—have been a byproduct of their general content consumption, making it potentially more difficult to express specific motivations. Future studies might sample participants directly from Reddit to confirm, challenge, or expand the motivational categories found in this study with heavy users of the platform.

It also needs to be noted that while being statistically significant, the regression model testing the predictive power of the motivational factors explained only 11% of the overall variation in Reddit use frequency, indicating that additional factors exert a significant influence on user behavior. These factors could be related to habitual uses (e.g., second screening) participants were unable to verbalize (an issue noted in previous uses and gratifications research) or stem from Reddit use outside of the realm of sport. Future research should investigate additional factors contributing to use of the platform. Similarly, future research might explore how the uses and gratifications of different social media platforms in the context of sport differ directly to further help distinguish Reddit's role in overall sport media consumption. It also seems worthwhile to further explore potential differences in actual usage behavior. For example, a strict distinction can be made between merely lurking and actively participating. These different types of usage are likely to reflect different levels of engagement and identification.

Finally, we used the term “niche” to classify the UFL in this paper. We acknowledge that more quantitative work is needed to identify the league's status as niche or small mass-market, as outlined by Fujak and colleagues (2024). Follow-up research should therefore aim at clarifying whether the UFL—and similar leagues receiving less attention—indeed exhibit elevated rates of consumer loyalty and other characteristics outlined in relevant research.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was supported by the Marie Hartwig Pilot Research Grant at the University of Michigan.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jan Boehmer

Notes

Appendix

The following analysis is part of an academic study aimed at investigating motivations to use the social media platform Reddit in the context of sport. The uploaded text file contains the raw data generated by survey participants responding in their own words to the following prompt: “Please describe in your own words why you use Reddit in the context of sport.”

Below are the instructions for how to conduct the analysis. The included references provide further information on the methods. You need to adhere to the principles outlined in these studies and your analysis can only be based on the explicitly stated responses, fabrication is strictly prohibited. Please provide transparent reports for each of the indicated steps describing the process.

For the analysis, you are required to take a constant-comparative approach that allows patterns to emerge from the data (Tracy, 2012). The first stage is the open-coding phase, where you will read all responses for a preliminary “soak” in the data before proceeding with line-by-line coding (Saldana, 2012). Consistent with the constant-comparative approach (Glaser, 1965; Glaser & Strauss, 1967), each response will be compared with the preceding response as codes begin to emerge. Axial coding will follow this step (Lindlof & Taylor, 2010). This is when the codes start to link together under unifying conceptual bins and related codes are combined to form categories. Once the categories are fully developed, you will construct narratives around them to distinguish them clearly from one another. Use direct quotes from participant responses as examples in the descriptions of each category. List all of your results.

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