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The purpose of this paper is to test the psychometric properties of the Team Brand Personality Scale by Blank et al. (2013, 2018) in the context of the professional football clubs in Greece, based on the perceptions of fans for their own team and the rival team. The brand personality team scores of the fans are also used to create a league map presenting the brand personality of the different teams of the Greek football Super League.

Following a quantitative research design, 724 Greek football fans completed an electronic questionnaire assessing demographics, brand personality, team identification, sport involvement, attitudinal loyalty and game attractiveness.

The results partially confirmed the psychometric properties of the brand personality scale and suggested that the notion of brand personality influences positively the attitudinal loyalty and game attractiveness of the fans. Based on the results, the personality structure for the football league was also created and discussed.

This study was set to focus only on the brand personality perceptions of the highly identified fans of football teams, known in the literature as realized brand personality. However, a thorough understanding of the particular concept requires also the perspective of sport marketers who may perceive the brand personality in a different manner (i.e. intended brand personality), so as to build a holistic picture of brand personality of football teams.

This research confirms that football teams have already projected a unique personality among their highly identified fans which can be used by marketing practitioners while designing integrated communication strategies.

This paper contributes to the broad brand personality literature by replicating Blank’s et al.’s sport team personality scale to the Greek context and the league level, involving both supporting fans and rivals.

Communication is one of the most important functions of management. Coaches of team and individual sports should know how to communicate successfully with athletes and assistants in order to maximize individual and team performance. A lack of communication means problems in coordination, cohesion and cooperation among the group. The coach, acting like the transmitter, should find the most appropriate ways to send its messages to the receivers, athletes and assistants. Effective communication between coaches and athletes in practice, before, during and after the game is a crucial factor and could affect positively or negatively team and individual performance. This research, based on review of literature and questionnaires, indicates the communication barriers among coaches and athletes, defines basic communication principles, and suggests methods of improving communication. The results and conclusions of this research are important for coaches, who coach and lead athletes and wish to have an effective and fruitful communication style.

Drawing on the discursive properties of placemaking theory, this paper discusses the development of film tourism in Crete from the release of the award-winning Zorba the Greek (dir. Michael Cacoyannis, ZG) to date. The approach is “genealogical,” seeking to explain how ZG-inspired tourism on Crete ended up being more than about the film itself owing to historical contingency.

EU membership has been for the greater part of the post-authoritarian period (1974–2010) an important element of the Greek national consensus. Europe was commonly associated in public discourse with geopolitical security, democratic institutions and economic prosperity. Moreover, accession to the European Monetary Union in 2001 was celebrated as proof of a successful national course and as promise for economic growth. Nevertheless, challenges to pro-Europeanism both from the left and from the extreme right have risen in the context of the economic crisis (2010–2015). While Euro-sceptical attitudes are still a minority within Greek society – but significantly increased in relation to past trends – the discursive negotiation of Europe in the Greek public debate is characterized by ambiguity and has acquired various negative connotations (e.g. austerity policies, authoritarianism, German hegemony, democratic deficit in decision-making). In the highly-polarized Greek political debate, a new cleavage has emerged based on the acceptance or rejection of the loan agreements and the austerity policies associated with them (the so-called pro- vs. anti-memorandum cleavage) which have also transformed traditional Left vs. Right cleavage thus allowing for political alliances between left-ward and right-ward parties. It remains to be seen whether the new cleavage will take the form of a clash between pro-Europeanists vs. Euroscepticists as it is often argued in the context of Grexit scenarios. While this new dichotomy can be misleading especially if it is unambiguously interpreted in cultural terms, it describes a newly formed social and political tension that is under process. A special chapter in this respect is the currency debate; the dilemma between the euro and the drachma represents distinct ideological paradigms and power structures. The present chapter explores the discursive negotiation of Europe in the context of the Greek public debate analysing discourses produced both by political elites and mass media with special focus on the 2015 referendum campaign and the implications of the July 2015 Greece-EU agreement.

When I met Yorgos for the first time I was spending some time as a tourist in a small village in Southern Crete, Greece, which I later called Pousos. This was after several returns as a traveling anthropologist and after the place had become my primary field site for studying the transnational and turbulent social and cultural relations created by both tourism and migration in the Greek-Mediterranean border zones of the European Union (EU) (Römhild, 2002, 2008, 2009, 2010). At that time, in the late 1990s, Yorgos was running a tavern right across the small town square and opposite the small complex of restored stone houses in which my family and I had rented an apartment for our stay. He shared the work with Amie, his girlfriend, who served the meals and chatted with the guests while Yorgos would spend much time in the kitchen.