Insights from Football Stadiums as Tourist Destinations Using Online User Reviews

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

In recent decades, the approach to building new stadiums has changed radically, both because of the need to replace aging facilities and because of the emergence of new football clubs seeking to establish their identity through their home ground. This new trend is due to changing socioeconomic conditions, but also to the modern demands of sports (Paramio et al., 2008). Luxury and an improved fan experience have become defining features of modern stadiums (Rockerbie, 2024). Safety issues have played a key role in shaping sports infrastructure, as the past violent incidents at football matches have led to stricter regulations and government intervention (Ginesta, 2016; Paramio et al., 2008).

At the same time, various economic pressures, sports marketing, technological innovation, and the requirements of global events and activities have significantly contributed to the transformation of stadium design and its multi-functionality. Significant investments have enhanced both visitors’ experience and stadium efficiency (Fried & Kastel, 2020; Ginesta, 2016; Lee et al., 2015).

Many large American and European stadiums now operate as platforms for promoting their brand throughout the year, offering, among other things, hospitality services and products aimed at attracting visitors-consumers outside of match days (Brochado et al., 2021; Ramos et al., 2022). Services such as stadium tours, visits to club museums, and the availability of retail stores, restaurants, and cafes offer complementary experiences, providing visitors with access to both the front and back-end of the main “stage” of a stadium (Brochado et al., 2021). Hence, stadiums have become an integral part of the tourism marketing strategies of both football clubs and the cities that host them, offering multidimensional and high-quality experiences to visitors/tourists to an urban destination (Ginesta, 2016; Edensor et al., 2021; Ramos et al., 2022). This new role for stadiums transforms infrastructure into attractive landmarks, incorporates strategic tourism alliances, invests in sponsorship opportunities, such as naming rights, and participates in new cooperation programs to gain visitor loyalty that goes beyond traditional participation (Vrondou, 2022).

In addition, emphasis is placed on sustainability, which is fundamentally considered from the early stages of design and construction, as well as on contemporary architectural trends. The sustainability of stadiums is closely linked to the effective use of sports facilities after events, since the very high construction and maintenance cost requires investments that are not fully recouped by match-day spectator attendance alone (Fried & Kastel, 2020). In this context, there is a growing tendency to renovate existing stadiums to meet sustainability requirements (Khashaba & Rehan, 2020). The renovation of stadiums requires a multidisciplinary approach that addresses social, environmental, and economic dimensions to enhance comfort and quality of life and reduce waste production (Trachte & Salvesen, 2014).

On the other hand, this transformation is followed by increasing challenges, such as economic, environmental, and social changes, while it competes with the rapid growth of other entertainment venues (Paramio et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2012; Ginesta, 2016). The demand for modern, sustainable, and attractive tourist destinations, combined with the impact of new technologies and continuous improvements in venue management, has led to the construction of increasingly luxurious stadiums that attract millions of tourists throughout the year, serving as multifunctional entertainment platforms (Ginesta, 2016).

However, academic interest in stadium tourism is considered insufficient, despite the increasing efforts of clubs to promote their facilities as tourist destinations, both on match days and outside of them, and despite the growing global appeal of football, star players, major events, and large, multi-functional stadiums (Oliveira et al., 2021; Brochado et al., 2021; Edensor et al., 2021).

Some papers highlight the broader role of sports tourism in enhancing the image of a destination (Andersson et al., 2021; Chang et al., 2021). However, it is only recently that football-related tourism has begun to be studied, with the first studies appearing in 2003 (Oliveira et al., 2021). More recent studies have used bibliometric approaches to examine its relationship with sustainable development (Jiang & Jiang, 2024), while reviews of sports tourism provide the necessary framework for understanding the phenomenon (Mollah et al., 2021; Kumar et al., 2023; Arici et al., 2023). It is worth noticing that most studies have explored the topic from the supply side (Ginesta, 2016; Brochado et al., 2021; Ramshaw & Gammon, 2010; Ramshaw et al., 2013).

It is clear that football stadiums should be further investigated as primary hubs of football tourism, particularly from visitors’ perspectives, focusing on the post-COVID-19 pandemic period. Tourist experiences and their sentiment impact, as experienced on match days, and especially outside them, also need more study and analysis (Brochado et al., 2021; Ramos et al., 2022; Edensor et al., 2021; Darko et al., 2023). Thus, this paper aims to enrich the existing literature by exploring visitors’ experiences of stadium visits, measuring the sentiment impact of those experiences.

More specifically, this study aims to examine the sentiment impact of visitors’ experiences at a football stadium on well-defined themes known to be related to football stadiums. The research is focused on comments posted on well-known online review platforms by visitors to eight (8) major European and five (5) Greek football stadiums. The main selection criteria were the UEFA ranking and UEFA star-quality of stadiums/stadium capacity. The objectives of this study are summarized in the following research questions:

Q1. What are the main themes that emerge from online reviews of selected football stadiums? Do the findings confirm the themes identified in the literature?

Q2. Which themes are most frequently mentioned?

Q3. What is the sentiment impact on visitors for each of these themes?

Q4. Are there differences in the preferences and experiences of visitors between the European and Greek stadiums studied?

The article is structured as follows. The subsequent section reviews the relevant literature, followed by a detailed description of the methodological framework. Data analysis employs a mixed text-mining approach applied to football stadium reviews from well-known and widely used platforms, such as Google and TripAdvisor. The adopted strategy is based on natural language processing (NLP) techniques, semantic similarity algorithms, and sentiment analysis. In depth, the proposed process begins with the lexical expansion of the adopted themes and generates comprehensive keyword sets for each theme. These sets are then used to match the used comments to the members of the theme set and consequently to the themes themselves. The next step is to apply sentiment analysis, using a dictionary-based approach to represent experience sentiment as a numeric value. This combination of sentiment analysis and theme-based matching enables the measurement of sentiment for each theme. The article concludes with the presentation of research findings, a discussion of their practical implications, and suggestions for future research.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Literature Review

As the tourism industry increasingly focuses on providing exciting and memorable experiences, growing competition among destinations has led to the need to create value through distinctive and differentiated experiential offerings (Neuhofer et al., 2015). This shift coincided with a broader transformation of the global economy, moving from a service-based model to an experience-based model, triggering an increasing academic interest in the nature of these tourism experiences and supporting the development of interdisciplinary approaches to their study (H. Zhang et al., 2018). Since then, tourism experiences have been examined from various scientific perspectives, from consumer behavior to phenomenology and sociology, with researchers recognizing the subjective and personal nature of these experiences (Otto & Ritchie, 1996; Knobloch et al., 2017).

In the context of football tourism, the tourist experience has been identified as an important factor in understanding their motivations, preferences, and behaviors. Football-related travelers exhibit a wide range of profiles and a variety of reasons for visiting, including participation in sporting events, watching matches, and participating in nostalgia-based activities such as stadium tours and visits to iconic football landmarks (Gibson, 1999; Higham, 2005). The connection between the experience and the “place,” as mediated through the physical stadium space and the atmosphere of the sports facilities, has been recognized as a vital element in shaping meaningful and immersive tourist experiences (Higham, 2005).

Enhancing the attractiveness of stadium facilities is a priority for sports teams, which often extend their offerings beyond their core product, the games, by providing complementary experiences and services (Ginesta, 2016). Thus, a visit to a stadium can be described by a multidimensional set of factors, including visitor characteristics, the social and physical environment, which collectively shape the overall visitor experience (Kaplanidou et al., 2012). From a marketing perspective, Berry (2000) emphasizes the importance of customer experience in shaping perceptions of service providers, which in this case extends to the image of the team itself. Ross (2006) argues that the image of a team is significantly influenced by the quality of services provided to fans.

Ramos et al. (2022) point out that football stadiums provide visitors with an opportunity to dive into the emotional and symbolic meaning of these places, which are often linked to the historic achievements of their favorite athletes and teams. This aspect of sports tourism, which invites individuals to engage with their memories and imagination, represents a unique position in the broader landscape of tourism (Cordina et al., 2019). As Humphreys (2019) notes, stadium tours are a form of recreation that offers personal satisfaction and emotional fulfillment. Regardless of watching live matches, visitor satisfaction is primarily based on the opportunity to enjoy an authentic behind-the-scenes experience (Gammon & Fear, 2005).

According to Brochado et al. (2021), the holistic nature of tours of football stadiums and museums includes not only distinct physical spaces but also varied experiences at different points in time. Visitors often associate these tours with the historical achievements of the clubs, while at the same time projecting their expectations for future success. These expectations motivate football clubs to expand the use of their facilities, enhancing their financial sustainability and creating memorable moments for visiting fans, promoting their involvement and co-creation of content (Brochado et al., 2021). Furthermore, the emotional intensity experienced by fans during these visits highlights their central role in shaping a competitive tourist destination. Thus, rather than relying solely on technological simulations, these tours create a form of “virtual emotional reality” in which captivating emotional experiences evoke a dreamlike state filled with intense emotional bonds.

The image of a team, understood as the sum of consumers’ associations and attitudes toward a team, is largely shaped by previous experiential interactions (Papadimitriou et al., 2016). Whenever offering experiences go beyond passively watching a game, fans’ loyalty to their team is strengthened (Woratschek et al., 2020). Positive experiences in the stadium environment can reinforce brand memory and cultivate positive attitudes toward the team (Biscaia et al., 2016). Keller (1993) emphasizes that brand experiences delineate the basis for the cognitive associations that consumers develop, which are crucial for brand formation. Therefore, the team, which acts as the main service provider during the stadium experience, plays a decisive role in shaping consumer perceptions and brand loyalty (Berry, 2000). Ultimately, visitors are likely to associate their stadium experience directly with the team’s brand, reinforcing the strategic importance of managing the quality and design of such experiences.

Despite growing interest in football stadium tourism, only a few studies have focused on the multifaceted and multi-layered experiences that these offers. These include, among other things, commercial activities such as retail shopping (Bale, 2000), the organization of corporate events (Lee et al., 2015; Stevens & Wootton, 1997), and the hosting of private events such as weddings and family celebrations (Ginesta, 2016). Other studies have examined the use of stadiums as concert venues (Zinganel, 2010) or as platforms for promoting health and wellness activities (Ramshaw, 2017). At the same time, scholars have focused on integrating tourist experiences within the wider stadium environment, particularly through sports halls of fame, stadium tours, and museums (Gammon & Fear, 2005; Ramshaw & Gammon, 2010). According to Proctor and Bordoloi (2023), multi-layered experiences not only promote leisure and corporate products and services, but also appeal to “heritage customers,” that is, visitors interested in the history, culture, and nostalgia surrounding sports. Darko et al. (2023) examined the satisfaction of stadium visitors through service quality analysis, using a text mining technique, highlighting the need to understand audience’s preferences.

Oliveira et al. (2024) examined the tourist experience offered by the “Camp Nou Experience” service, highlighting the role of the stadium as a leading football-related attraction, leveraging existing literature and managerial insights. The key elements shaping the experience include professionally guided tours, technological amenities, and the strong global brand identity of the club. In conclusion, the “Camp Nou Experience” service illustrates how football clubs can transform stadiums into global tourist destinations that combine cultural heritage, entertainment, and commerce, while enhancing both cultural value and economic strength and resilience. In this direction, Brochado et al. (2021) examined visitor reviews posted on TripAdvisor for 10 top European football stadiums and identified 15 key factors that shape visitor experiences, namely fans, tours, stadium infrastructure, the team, museums, staff, and catering services. They argue that these factors are critical to optimizing stadium utilization and enhancing fan engagement, although their continued relevance in the post-COVID-19 context requires further investigation. Similarly, Edensor et al. (2021) examined TripAdvisor visitor reviews of 44 English football stadiums through thematic analysis, revealing the function of stadiums as sites of pilgrimage and heritage, restaurants, and venues with prosaic and functional attributes. They suggested future research on the subject after the COVID-19 pandemic, in more diverse stadiums, using alternative algorithms and techniques. Ramos et al. (2022) analyzed reviews of 17 European stadiums and highlighted the relationship between visitor experiences, their satisfaction, and the brands of both the teams and the cities that host them, suggesting that future works should consider less-recognized destinations globally and incorporate additional platforms. Overall, these studies underscore the importance of investigating how experiences shape the role of stadiums as tourist attractions and their broader contribution to destination development, particularly on non-match days.

2.2. Methodology

Online reviews can be briefly defined as public evaluations of various products and services posted on online platforms to share positive or negative opinions and experiences (Pocchiari et al., 2025). The content of online reviews can provide a large set of data about the experiences of stadium visitors, whether they are watching a match or enjoying complementary services, retail products, and hospitality services, offering additional benefits such as spontaneity, reliability, and accessibility (Brochado et al., 2021). Beyond describing behavior and experiences, online reviews provide a variety of data, facts, opinions, impressions, emotions, and attitudes of visitors (Ye et al., 2014; Edensor et al., 2021), offering researchers valuable insights into the visitor experience. Online reviews, considered either as data or as forms of electronic word-of-mouth, hold important information for businesses, either in multimedia form or as numerical ratings (Pocchiari et al., 2025).

This study focused on this valuable data source and examined the online narratives posted and shared by visitors (Brochado et al., 2021; Ramos et al., 2022; Edensor et al., 2021) to some of the most significant football stadiums in Europe and Greece, including match days and non-match-day experiences. As Ramos et al. (2022) highlighted “a guest’s review regarding a visit within a particular game event context, a supplemental service (like the club’s museum), or a tour outside of an event could not be thoroughly dissected. Some stadiums may find it easier to separate these services than others because many stadiums are now multipurpose spaces that promote several sub-brands in addition to sporting activities”. Moreover, according to official sources, e.g., football clubs’ official websites, and existing literature (Ginesta, 2016; Brochado et al., 2021; Gammon & Fear, 2005), various services, such as stadium tours and museums, are explicitly offered on non-match days. Therefore, it can be assumed that the experiences that are related to these services should be consumed on non-match days. To this end, existing theoretical frameworks with known thematic categories, concerning both match and non-match days, were used (deductive method of producing results), while allowing for new themes as they emerged from the data analysis (inductive method of producing results), thereby improving the validity and reliability of the results (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006; Y. Zhang & Wildermuth, 2009; Proudfoot, 2023).

Initially, thematic frameworks related to the experiences developed during visits to football stadiums were adopted from the existing literature: Brochado et al. (2021), Ramos et al. (2022), Edensor et al. (2021), Panagopoulos et al. (2025), Panchanathan et al. (2017), van Heck et al. (2021), and Proctor and Bordoloi (2023). Then, some new thematic objects were mined and introduced from the wider literature about stadium tourism, namely nostalgia, backstage (the word associated with “behind the scenes”), social, impact (“social impact” was the proposed phrase), and legacy (

Table 1. Existing concepts and thematic frameworks on stadium tourism.

Authors	Thematic Framework
Panagopoulos et al. (2025)	technology, accessibility, commercial opportunity, customer service, entertainment, engagement, operational efficiency, safety/security, sustainability
Morfoulaki et al. (2023)	social impact
Proctor and Bordoloi (2023)	hospitality, business, corporate, heritage, dining, museum, tour, events
Ramos et al. (2022)	experience, team brand image, destination image
Brochado et al. (2021)	fan, tour, stadium, team, museum, room, staff, game, (best) place, ticket, seating, recommendation, food, shop, attraction
Cho et al. (2021)	Nostalgia
Edensor et al. (2021)	museum, restaurant, pilgrimage, heritage, service
Preuss and Plambeck (2021)	Legacy
van Heck et al. (2021)	economy, infrastructure, strategy, functions, revenues
Panchanathan et al. (2017)	entertainment, service, commerce, safety/security, sustainability

).

The primary criterion for selecting the research subjects, the football stadiums, was the UEFA ranking list of football teams (UEFA, 2024). The geographical location of these stadiums was the second criterion: in this study, purely European and purely Greek stadiums were selected. The second criterion is introduced to enable a comparative study of a global market, such as European football, and a relatively small one, such as Greek football, with different tourist experiences and stadium characteristics, etc. European stadiums were selected based on the UEFA rankings of the respective football teams as the most prominent European football brands, hosted in top-quality stadiums (UEFA, 2024), while Greek stadiums were selected based on their capacity and ranking as UEFA star-quality stadiums (Wikipedia, 2025). Accordingly, the following eight most important European stadiums and five most important Greek stadiums were selected (

Table 2. (a). Target population: European Stadiums. (b). Target population: Greek Stadiums.

(a)
UEFA Ranking	Football Club	League	Country	Stadium
1	Manchester City	Premier League	UK	Etihad Stadium
2	Bayern Munich	Bundesliga	Germany	Allianz Arena
3	Real Madrid	La Liga	Spain	Bernabéu Stadium
4	Paris Sain-Germain FC	Ligue 1	France	Parc de Princes St.
5	Liverpool FC	Premier League	UK	Anfield Stadium
6	Roma FC, Lazio FC	Serie A	Italy	Stadio Olimpico
7	Milan FC, Inter FC	Serie A	Italy	San Siro Stadium
8	Borussia Dortmund	Bundesliga	Germany	Signal Iduna Park
(b)
Stadium Capacity	Football Club	League	Country	Stadium
1	Panathinaikos FC	Super League	Greece	Olympic Stadium/OAKA
2	Olympiacos FC	Super League	Greece	Karaiskaki Stadium
3	AEK FC	Super League	Greece	OPAP Arena
4	PAOK FC	Super League	Greece	Toumpa Stadium
5	AEL FC	Super League	Greece	AEL Arena

a,b).

The online reviews used in this study were collected between August and November 2025 from the online platforms TripAdvisor and Google. These reviews document the post-visit experience at the aforementioned football stadiums. TripAdvisor and Google are the largest and most popular travel platforms (Su & Teng, 2018; Edensor et al., 2021; Ramos et al., 2022). Initially, TripAdvisor was selected as the main data source, as, it is regarded as the “premier” source for social media research in the hospitality and travel industry (Xiang et al., 2018). But in the case of Greek stadiums, data collected from both Google and TripAdvisor, since the number of reviews were insufficient for this research. Mellinas and Sicilia (2024) pointed out that “the findings clearly indicate that Google has greater potential to accumulate reviews” as well as “destinations tend to have higher ratings on Google than on TripAdvisor”. So, it stands to reason to supplement our data set using Google platform. Furthermore, the higher ratings on Google somewhat mitigate the differences among European and Greek Stadiums. So given this data, any observed difference will be established due to “more favorable” ratings of Greek stadiums. The TripAdvisor/Google data ratio is as follows: Olympic Stadium/OAKA 62/1077, Karaiskaki Stadium 114/412, OPAP Arena 16/427, Toumpa Stadium 100/357, AEL Arena 0/283.

Collectively, these reviews constitute the core dataset for this study, that is, the recorded experiences of visitors to the selected stadiums (Figure 1).

2.3. Research Framework

The proposed methodological design is described in Figure 2 and consists of a mixed approach combining text-mining and analysis processes, implemented in the R programming language (version 4.5.1) (R Core Team, 2025). In the first step of preprocessing, the collected reviews were translated into English (where necessary) using automatic translation tools. For this research, the built-in “Translate” tool in Microsoft 365 was used and specifically DETECTLANGUAGE and TRANSLATE functions of MS Excel. In cases where the total number of reviews did not exceed 2000, they were translated regardless of the language in which they were written. Reviews that were not written in English and numbered fewer than 50 were not included. Then, the data was “cleaned” following the basic procedure below: removing formatting, tokenization, text normalization, handling punctuation, removing stop words, stemming and lemmatization (Chai, 2023): all punctuation marks, numbers, and unnecessary spaces were deleted, each review was converted to lowercase, and common English keywords were removed so that the study could focus on keywords with content of interest. In natural language processing, preprocessing the text is necessary to ensure consistency and minimize linguistic noise. Furthermore, text preprocessing is essential, as it increases the accuracy of subsequent stages of semantic and sentiment analysis and the reliability of keyword matching (Silge & Robinson, 2017).

The second step of the analysis consists of the process of theme definition and keyword expansion. In addition to the well-known thematic frameworks found in the literature review (Table 1), additional themes were proposed following an initial screening of the reviews, which were assumed to be part of the visitors’ experience. It should be noted that the additional themes do not affect the validity of the overall process. The methodology used analyzes each comment independently, allowing researchers to explore a variety of themes without necessarily having evidence of their significance. Thus, in the experiments of this study, a set of 46 single-word themes was used, as described in

Table 3. The proposed thematic framework on stadium tourism sorted in alphabetical order.

accessibility, attraction, backstage, business, commerce, corporate, destination, dining, economy, efficiency, events, experience, fan, food, functions, game, heritage, hospitality, image, impact, infrastructure, legacy, loyalty, museum, nostalgia, operations, opportunity, pilgrimage, place, recommend, revenues, room, safety, seating, security, service, shop, social, stadium, staff, strategy, sustainability, team, technology, ticket, tour

. Non-single-word themes (multidimensional thematic frameworks), e.g., safety–security, commercial opportunities, were considered as distinct words or replaced with a single one. Each of the themes used represents a dimension of the experience of visitors at a football stadium.

The one-dimensional nature of the proposed thematic framework (Table 1) imposed limitations on language coverage and the lexical variety used in the actual reviews. For this reason, the proposed themes were expanded by generating keywords that semantically describe them. This expansion was implemented using a pre-trained 50-dimensional vector space for word representation, the Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) model (Pennington et al., 2014). For each theme, semantically related words were identified by cosine similarity between the vector representation of the theme and all other word vectors in the GloVe embedding space. The nearest neighbor approach was used instead of a fixed cosine similarity threshold to ensure a consistent number of keywords per theme. Based on this similarity ranking, the ten most semantically similar words were selected as candidate keywords for each theme (Manning et al., 2008). This procedure is grounded on the distributional hypothesis, which argues that words with similar meanings tend to occur in similar linguistic contexts (Firth, 1957). To maintain conceptual clarity and reduce overlap among themes, candidate keywords that were identical to the themes in Table 3 were excluded. The resulting expanded keyword sets were subsequently reviewed by the authors to ensure their relevance within the tourism and hospitality context.

In the third step of the analysis, each review was assigned to a theme or to several themes. The assignment was performed using a lexicon-based content analysis approach, allowing reviews to be assigned to multiple themes based on the presence of keywords. Reviews that did not contain any of the keywords were identified as “Unclassified”.

A frequency analysis was then carried out in two stages. In the first stage, the frequency of the themes in Table 1 was calculated for each stadium in order to identify the most important facets of the visitors’ experience. In the second stage, word-frequency analysis was performed on all reviews for each stadium to capture visitors’ expressive patterns and commonly used vocabulary. The purpose of this analysis was to identify the aspects of the visitor experience that are most frequently mentioned in user reviews. By examining the distribution of themes across the entire dataset, thematic frequency analysis allows for the identification of dominant dimensions of experience and recurring patterns in visitor perceptions (Marine-Roig, 2017).

In the final step, sentiment analysis was performed using a general dictionary-based approach, specifically the syuzhet method (Jockers, 2017), to assign a continuous sentiment score to each review. The syuzhet method relies on a pre-compiled sentiment dictionary in which individual words are assigned continuous polarity scores reflecting their positive or negative emotional valence. For each comment each word is matched to the lexicon and compute a sentiment score by summing the individual word values. The resulting sentiment score is a continuous numeric value, where positive values indicate overall positive emotional tone and negative values indicate negative tone. The raw output is not constrained to the interval [−1, 1], as it represents the aggregate sum of word-level sentiment scores, and therefore, longer texts may yield larger absolute values. In this study, theme-level sentiment was calculated by averaging comment-level sentiment scores within each theme. This approach was used to evaluate the overall sentiment tone and reactions expressed through visitor reviews.

3. Results

Forty-six single-word themes were used to implement the proposed methodological framework. Each collected review can potentially be matched to any number of themes, theoretically, from none to all. Some themes are not worth mentioning, as very few reviews were mapped on them.

To ensure that analyses of each stadium were meaningful, ranking lists were introduced. A ranking list corresponds to a stadium and contains themes sorted based on the total number of reviews assigned to them. We then arbitrarily considered only the top ten themes from each ranking list. At the end of this function, a total of 19 out of 46 themes were considered to be the most prominent for this study, as presented in

Table 4. Theme frequencies and average sentiment score for European and Greek stadiums.

Theme	Frequency	Total	Europe	Greece
team	13	3.163	3.206	1.443
place	13	2.465	2.582	0.922
game	13	3.21	3.25	1.475
experience	13	3.559	3.634	1.727
room	12	3.323	3.362	1.099
opportunity	12	3.479	3.517	1.634
fan	12	3.599	3.661	1.897
events	8	3.172	3.264	1.102
seating	6	3.556	3.596	1.14
legacy	6	3.604	3.661	1.666
dining	5	3.737	3.758	1.693
stadium	4	2.98	3.016	1.099
ticket	3	3.227	3.246	1.272
service	3	3.536	3.599	1.782
tour	2	3.269	3.324	0.943
shop	1	3.558	3.601	1.943
museum	1	3.89	3.926	2.626
heritage	1	3.88	4.089	1.636
attraction	1	3.49	3.587	1.71

(

Table A1. Review frequencies (FRQ) and average sentiment (SNT) for all European and Greek stadiums (Part A).

	Etihad Stadium			Allianz Arena			Bernabéu			Parc de Princes St.			Anfield Stadium			Stadio Olimpico			San Siro Stadium
No	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT
1	Place	4794	3.72	place	7036	2.30	place	5542	2.87	Place	961	2.28	place	7423	3.11	Place	1665	1.93	place	5777	1.35
2	Team	1505	4.63	team	2461	2.83	team	3061	3.40	Game	371	2.59	team	2411	3.58	Game	613	2.34	team	1858	2.33
3	Experience	1286	4.45	stadium	2147	2.60	game	1757	3.56	Team	354	2.60	game	1926	3.65	Team	516	2.19	game	1206	2.43
4	Game	1204	4.46	game	1630	2.78	room	1548	3.55	Experience	237	2.87	experience	1685	4.07	Experience	420	2.75	room	1048	2.34
5	Opportunity	931	4.70	room	1519	2.88	opportunity	1434	3.72	Fan	220	3.05	legacy	1538	3.74	opportunity	387	2.34	opportunity	777	2.46
6	Fan	858	4.98	experience	1320	3.15	legacy	1261	3.62	Opportunity	195	2.55	opportunity	1441	4.17	Fan	384	2.85	experience	775	2.87
7	Room	781	4.76	opportunity	1235	2.90	seating	1213	3.66	Room	158	2.29	Fan	1336	4.03	Tour	356	2.05	fan	761	2.79
8	Legacy	579	5.15	fan	1123	3.20	experience	1188	3.73	Ticket	120	2.81	room	1124	4.17	Room	284	2.38	seating	654	2.38
9	Dining	510	5.33	events	820	2.78	dining	1182	3.69	Events	119	2.51	dining	949	4.50	events	268	2.41	dining	607	2.44
10	Seating	486	5.21	dining	761	3.19	fan	1165	3.89	Service	117	3.10	seating	729	4.33	ticket	233	2.72	events	570	2.42
11	Events	438	4.44	ticket	760	3.03	stadium	904	3.77	Stadium	85	2.51	events	626	3.96	service	162	2.53	legacy	501	2.56
12	Service	435	4.79	seating	750	3.22	ticket	788	3.60	Shop	78	2.73	tour	482	4.20	social	105	2.01	ticket	436	2.22
13	Tour	396	4.50	service	600	2.89	events	734	3.77	Legacy	71	2.58	service	472	4.68	legacy	103	2.29	service	390	2.81
14	Stadium	372	3.60	tour	600	2.75	service	510	3.57	Seating	68	2.76	ticket	422	3.89	seating	103	1.93	tour	358	2.44
15	Staff	358	5.70	shop	581	2.70	image	471	4.27	Tour	65	3.09	staff	403	5.11	stadium	99	2.52	attraction	241	2.73
16	Shop	251	5.20	legacy	436	3.35	tour	445	3.84	Dining	61	2.89	shop	376	4.82	attraction	93	2.81	shop	237	2.36
17	Backstage	241	5.08	recommend	344	3.07	shop	365	3.81	Attraction	40	3.48	image	363	4.71	Shop	86	3.35	stadium	204	2.19
18	Ticket	215	4.47	attraction	301	3.14	staff	297	4.09	Functions	38	3.13	stadium	330	3.97	infrastructure	85	2.00	staff	202	3.08
19	Recommend	208	5.40	social	227	2.89	destination	224	4.25	Image	37	3.23	museum	317	4.34	Staff	76	2.46	infrastructure	201	2.13
20	Image	158	5.87	staff	225	3.61	functions	205	4.05	Staff	35	2.98	functions	236	3.95	functions	71	2.93	functions	155	2.33
21	Functions	148	4.41	destination	220	2.81	museum	190	4.01	Destination	33	2.89	recommend	236	4.21	Destination	62	3.05	heritage	128	2.87
22	Hospitality	112	4.78	impact	220	2.53	attraction	187	4.39	Social	30	2.92	impact	191	3.71	image	62	2.44	recommend	123	2.96
23	Corporate	106	5.75	functions	196	3.12	recommend	184	3.91	Infrastructure	22	1.78	attraction	190	4.37	impact	60	2.99	image	122	3.08
24	Impact	103	4.92	hospitality	191	2.69	infrastructure	110	2.43	Safety	22	1.78	backstage	159	4.65	dining	48	2.14	economy	120	1.91
25	Attraction	95	5.59	image	184	3.48	impact	106	4.24	Food	20	1.80	corporate	144	5.79	heritage	46	2.73	destination	119	3.05
26	Destination	90	5.03	infrastructure	152	2.92	revenues	106	4.18	impact	18	3.14	destination	138	3.69	Hospitality	43	2.51	social	99	2.48
27	Social	88	5.12	food	132	2.97	hospitality	98	4.30	recommend	16	3.35	heritage	122	4.47	recommend	41	3.17	impact	98	2.30
28	Heritage	67	6.48	revenues	118	2.62	food	97	4.19	heritage	15	2.49	infrastructure	113	4.08	economy	35	1.43	museum	92	2.58
29	Infrastructure	62	5.40	museum	109	3.31	corporate	93	4.06	economy	14	1.43	hospitality	110	5.47	Operation	35	2.05	hospitality	86	2.90
30	Strategy	62	5.25	strategy	96	3.09	heritage	87	4.87	museum	12	2.83	food	100	4.98	safety	34	2.07	revenues	83	2.63
31	Museum	61	5.05	business	67	3.34	strategy	79	3.59	revenues	12	1.55	strategy	78	4.84	Accessibility	23	1.48	food	69	3.57
32	Efficiency	60	5.68	backstage	58	3.33	business	68	3.88	backstage	11	3.46	social	67	4.15	strategy	20	2.40	safety	62	3.00
33	Food	53	4.09	corporate	56	4.43	social	67	3.87	hospitality	11	3.91	revenues	62	3.85	commerce	18	0.88	strategy	52	3.11
34	Business	52	5.49	safety	55	3.00	pilgrimage	46	4.39	security	10	1.52	business	60	5.04	efficiency	16	3.56	efficiency	44	3.36
35	Safety	50	4.12	efficiency	54	3.57	operations	36	3.24	accessibility	9	3.28	efficiency	58	5.31	revenues	16	2.57	business	43	3.84
36	Revenues	34	4.62	operations	53	2.44	efficiency	35	4.76	business	9	2.42	pilgrimage	53	2.94	Food	14	3.20	operations	33	3.12
37	Operations	29	4.62	heritage	47	3.39	backstage	33	5.28	loyalty	8	2.49	safety	43	4.30	loyalty	14	2.04	accessibility	25	2.73
38	Loyalty	28	7.85	economy	40	3.49	safety	30	4.11	operations	7	2.09	operations	36	4.95	business	11	3.96	loyalty	21	2.88
39	Security	23	6.42	accessibility	35	2.12	loyalty	27	6.42	strategy	7	1.84	loyalty	33	5.78	museum	10	2.93	security	19	2.00
40	Accessibility	19	3.67	commerce	27	3.85	security	26	4.21	efficiency	6	2.71	security	27	5.61	corporate	7	0.91	backstage	17	3.55
41	Technology	17	7.23	loyalty	26	4.00	accessibility	25	4.48	technology	5	1.85	technology	20	5.30	security	7	5.02	pilgrimage	17	4.21
42	Economy	15	4.48	security	22	4.76	economy	23	2.70	commerce	4	1.68	economy	17	7.81	nostalgia	6	5.24	commerce	15	2.12
43	Commerce	13	3.87	technology	20	4.06	commerce	20	3.95	corporate	4	0.91	commerce	12	3.74	backstage	4	2.29	corporate	14	4.93
44	Pilgrimage	5	3.73	pilgrimage	16	2.50	technology	19	4.88	pilgrimage	2	1.98	nostalgia	12	4.13	Technology	3	2.10	nostalgia	6	3.13
45	Nostalgia	1	3.05	sustainability	9	3.74	nostalgia	5	4.16				accessibility	11	3.54	Pilgrimage	2	0.50	technology	5	5.16
46				nostalgia	2	2.18	Unclassified	4					sustainability	2	7.28

and

Table A2. Review frequencies (FRQ) and average sentiment (SNT) score for all European and Greek stadiums (Part B).

	Signal Iduna Park			OPAP Arena			Olympic Stadium/OAKA			Karaiskaki Stadium			AEL Arena			Toumpa Stadium
No	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT	THM	FRQ	SNT
1	Place	1901	2.35	place	434	1.48	place	1057	0.69	place	515	1.23	place	232	0.56	place	434	0.76
2	Team	789	2.77	team	60	2.02	experience	147	1.52	team	93	1.80	Team	28	0.84	fan	73	1.72
3	Game	593	2.87	fan	45	2.64	events	111	0.97	fan	69	2.18	experience	21	0.90	team	62	0.99
4	Fan	571	3.18	legacy	45	2.44	team	84	1.17	experience	58	1.88	Unclassified	20		game	39	1.22
5	experience	403	3.37	experience	39	2.88	game	83	1.20	game	47	1.66	game	12	0.79	experience	35	1.54
6	opportunity	286	3.12	game	35	2.39	opportunity	73	1.21	legacy	30	1.72	Fan	10	0.69	legacy	33	0.57
7	Ticket	256	3.13	room	34	2.06	stadium	54	1.21	service	28	2.11	service	7	2.01	attraction	21	1.39
8	Events	252	2.79	opportunity	26	2.59	room	49	0.53	shop	23	1.80	stadium	6	0.48	events	20	0.81
9	Stadium	247	2.72	museum	21	2.71	tour	48	0.72	opportunity	19	2.02	Room	4	−0.19	heritage	17	1.78
10	Room	237	3.23	events	19	1.97	seating	47	0.78	room	19	1.32	seating	4	0.14	opportunity	17	1.74
11	Seating	142	2.93	shop	19	2.48	service	45	1.05	events	18	1.57	heritage	3	1.58	Unclassified	14
12	attraction	139	3.09	attraction	17	1.77	fan	37	1.15	ticket	15	1.39	opportunity	3	0.68	room	9	0.69
13	Tour	131	3.42	stadium	14	0.95	social	33	0.74	attraction	13	1.65	events	2	−1.13	infrastructure	8	0.66
14	Service	126	3.24	food	13	2.04	legacy	26	1.72	heritage	12	1.23	hospitality	2	0.13	service	8	1.34
15	Legacy	123	3.41	functions	13	1.20	dining	25	1.13	hospitality	9	1.50	Legacy	2	0.88	ticket	8	0.48
16	Dining	104	3.09	service	13	3.75	image	25	0.56	food	8	2.10	Safety	2	0.75	shop	6	1.63
17	Staff	97	3.62	seating	11	2.76	staff	19	1.18	safety	8	1.13	Social	2	0.33	impact	5	0.80
18	functions	88	2.84	infrastructure	9	3.09	accessibility	18	0.89	tour	8	1.79	Accessibility	1	0.95	social	4	0.60
19	recommend	82	3.26	dining	8	2.69	attraction	18	2.14	dining	7	2.24	Attraction	1	0.60	food	3	1.93
20	destination	69	3.38	safety	8	1.36	efficiency	14	1.35	recommend	7	2.76	Business	1	−0.50	loyalty	3	0.90
21	Shop	64	3.20	tour	8	1.58	functions	13	1.89	staff	7	2.39	Dining	1	3.95	nostalgia	3	0.67
22	Social	62	3.47	heritage	7	1.54	hospitality	13	1.56	Unclassified	7		Economy	1	1.15	safety	3	2.00
23	hospitality	47	2.65	staff	7	1.64	destination	12	1.70	infrastructure	6	0.53	Efficiency	1	1.30	stadium	3	0.42
24	infrastructure	41	3.20	hospitality	6	2.30	impact	11	0.93	loyalty	6	1.88	Food	1	0.00	tour	3	0.53
25	Impact	31	3.25	loyalty	6	2.60	food	10	0.69	stadium	6	1.42	Infrastructure	1	−0.40	dining	2	1.78
26	economy	27	4.43	destination	5	2.40	heritage	9	2.02	image	5	1.43				efficiency	2	1.63
27	Image	27	3.20	social	5	1.75	infrastructure	9	1.58	seating	5	1.56				functions	2	−0.15
28	Safety	25	2.50	business	3	1.85	safety	9	0.61	social	5	1.28				hospitality	2	−0.05
29	business	23	3.41	image	3	3.42	shop	7	1.23	accessibility	3	2.13				image	2	0.13
30	revenues	23	2.98	recommend	3	3.67	business	6	1.13	efficiency	3	3.12				pilgrimage	2	0.38
31	backstage	22	3.78	strategy	3	1.38	loyalty	6	0.36	strategy	3	2.98				recommend	2	1.60
32	strategy	22	3.55	Unclassified	3		operations	6	0.67	business	2	1.60				seating	2	1.78
33	food	18	3.45	accessibility	2	1.43	security	6	0.13	commerce	2	2.05				staff	2	1.58
34	commerce	17	3.52	impact	2	1.20	ticket	6	1.78	destination	2	0.50				accessibility	1	1.70
35	corporate	17	6.22	nostalgia	2	4.95	strategy	5	2.32	impact	2	3.20				corporate	1	1.70
36	efficiency	14	4.94	operations	2	0.83	corporate	4	2.75	security	2	1.18				destination	1	0.25
37	loyalty	14	3.70	security	2	1.63	revenues	4	−0.18	museum	1	0.00				economy	1	1.15
38	museum	13	3.79	corporate	1	1.90	recommend	3	2.23	nostalgia	1	0.60				operations	1	3.15
39	operations	13	4.80	economy	1	1.90	commerce	1	3.40	operations	1	0.50				revenues	1	1.55
40	security	9	3.14	efficiency	1	2.25	museum	1	3.40	pilgrimage	1	2.30				strategy	1	−0.10
41	pilgrimage	8	3.28	pilgrimage	1	−3.40				revenues	1	2.00
42	technology	7	2.70	sustainability	1	1.75
43	accessibility	4	4.05	technology	1	1.75
44	heritage	3	4.50	ticket	1	2.85
45	nostalgia	2	4.18
46

in the Appendix A presents the frequencies of all studied themes across all stadiums). The first column of Table 4 lists the considered themes, the second shows the frequency of theme occurrences in ranking lists, and the third shows the weighted average sentiment per theme across all stadiums, while the fourth and fifth columns present the average sentiment per theme in European and Greek stadiums, respectively.

Based on the results of Table 4, we can make the following initial observations:

• The themes team, experience, place, and game were spotted in 13 stadiums.
• The themes room, opportunity, and fan appeared in 12 stadiums.
• The theme events was located in 8 stadiums.
• The themes seating and legacy were spotted in 6 stadiums.
• The theme dining was found in 5 stadiums.
• The theme stadium appeared in 4 stadiums.
• The themes ticket and service were discussed in 3 stadiums.
• The theme tour was spotted in 2 stadiums.
• The themes shop, museum, heritage, and attraction were located in 1 stadium each.

The most dominant emerging themes are presented in

Table 5. The proposed thematic framework on stadium tourism.

Proposed Thematic Framework	Validation
(commercial) opportunity, (customer) service	Panagopoulos et al. (2025)
events, dining, heritage, museum, service, tour	Proctor and Bordoloi (2023)
Experience	Ramos et al. (2022)
attraction, fan, game, museum, place, room, seating, shop, stadium, team, ticket, tour	Brochado et al. (2021)
legacy	Preuss and Plambeck (2021)
heritage, museum, service	Edensor et al. (2021)
Service	Panchanathan et al. (2017)

. It is evident that the application of the proposed framework results in well-known and validated themes found in existing literature. The “legacy” theme is thoroughly analyzed in an Olympic stadium framework (Preuss & Plambeck, 2021) and was initially considered as possible thematic dimension in stadium tourism.

Following the above findings, visitors are interested in a variety of themes, perhaps due to the distinct characteristics of each stadium, such as age and services provided (Ramos et al., 2022). Themes related to the core activities of the stadiums and the football experience (team, place, game, and experience) were discussed across all thirteen stadiums, indicating their fundamental role in shaping the visitor experience. These themes are consistently associated with relatively high sentiment scores across all stadiums, regardless of their geographical location, highlighting the centrality of sporting action, team identity, and overall experience quality in visitor ratings.

Themes related to visitor engagement and spatial experience (room, opportunity, and fan) were also prevalent across 12 stadiums. Among these, fan and experience scored particularly highly on the sentiment scale, suggesting that emotional engagement and participatory aspects of stadium visits are key factors in visitors’ positive perceptions.

Themes such as events, seating, and legacy were discussed in a moderate number of stadiums (six to eight). Despite their lower frequency compared to the core themes, these dimensions received high sentiment scores, particularly in European stadiums. The strong emotions associated with legacy suggest that the historical and symbolic narratives of stadiums can elicit significant emotional responses, even when not widely discussed. Similarly, seating consistently achieved a high sentiment score, suggesting that comfort and viewing quality remain important factors for visitor satisfaction when explicitly addressed.

Hospitality-related themes, such as dining, appeared in only five stadiums but achieved some of the highest overall sentiment scores in the dataset. This pattern underscores the importance of the food and beverage experience in the stadium environment, reinforcing its role as a value-adding element to the visitor experience.

Themes related to ancillary services (service, tour, and shop) appeared in relatively few stadiums. However, when they did appear, these themes were associated with particularly high sentiment scores, especially in Europe. This finding suggests that complementary services, although not widely discussed, can significantly improve emotional ratings when provided effectively.

Themes such as museum, heritage, and attraction appeared only once each, but were associated with the highest sentiment scores in the table. This result highlights the potential of cultural and educational activities to cause strong positive emotional reactions, even when they constitute specialized elements of the overall stadium experience.

Another interesting finding is that the proposed theme “legacy” appeared highly on the ranking lists, showing high positive levels of emotional excitement. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “legacy” is “something that is a part of your history or that remains from an earlier time” (dictionary.cambridge.org). Furthermore, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “legacy is something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past… relating to, associated with, or carried over from an earlier time, technology, business, etc.” (merriam-webster.com).

In stadium tourism, legacy refers to the consequences of using stadiums after a sporting event (Fang & Wan, 2014). Preuss and Plambeck (2021) developed a conceptual framework for stadium legacy consisting of four dimensions and twelve functions that an Olympic property may exhibit. Sant et al. (2013) conceptualized the legacy of Olympic tourism in Vancouver. Sant and Mason (2015) identified potential legacies arising from the events in Vancouver during the Olympic bid. Bama and Tichaawa (2020) explored mega-events and stadium legacies in South Africa. Essex and Latuf de Oliveira Sanchez (2024) examined the concepts of sustainability and legacies from cities that hosted the Summer Olympic Games, 2012–2024. Romano et al. (2023) investigated the legacy and impact of major sporting events in Brazil. Bondarik et al. (2020) identified the legacy of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil in terms of tourism development and urban mobility.

The above findings reveal an academic tendency to evaluate the forms of legacy left behind at stadiums after major sporting events. According to the results of this study, interest in stadium legacy is strong in football venues beyond major sporting events and, moreover, beyond football matches.

Remark 1. 

Although we limited the studied themes (we selected the 10 most dominant in each stadium and then the union of them formulate the proposed thematic framework), almost every theme occurs in every stadium except ticket, tour and shop, which occur in 12 (in all European and in 4 Greek stadiums), and museum in 11 stadiums (in all European and in 3 Greek stadiums). It is clear from Table A1 and Table A2 (Appendix A), especially in European stadiums, that all themes were reviewed by visitors, sometimes with less and sometimes with more intensity. For example, the “legacy” theme, appears only in 6 stadiums in the top ten ranking lists, however the average ranking across all stadiums is 10.15 and the average number of corresponding reviews is 365.23 across all stadiums (13), while for “attraction” theme, the average ranking is 16.77 and the average number of reviews is 104.31 across all stadiums (13). On the other hand, there are themes that exist in almost all stadiums but do not seem to “concern” a large portion of visitors, e.g., the “museum” theme is ranked at 29.18, with 75.18 reviews on average, while “heritage” theme is ranked at 24.77 and has 43.31 reviews on average (Appendix A,

Table A3. Themes’ average ranking and average number of reviews across all, European and Greek stadiums.

	Total		Europe		Greece
Theme	Avg Rank	Avg Revs	Avg Rank	Avg Revs	Avg Rank	Avg Revs
team	2.38	1021.69	2.25	1619.38	2.6	65.4
place	1	2905.46	1	4387.38	1	534.4
game	3.77	732	3	1162.5	5	43.2
experience	4.54	585.69	5	914.25	3.8	60
room	7.62	524.15	6.63	837.38	9.2	23
opportunity	6.92	524.92	5.63	835.75	9	27.6
fan	6.08	511.69	6.63	802.25	5.2	46.8
events	9.62	307.46	10	478.38	9	34
seating	14	324.15	10.75	518.13	19.2	13.8
legacy	10.15	365.23	10.88	576.5	9	27.2
dining	15.46	328.08	12.75	527.75	19.8	8.6
stadium	13.38	343.92	12.25	548.5	15.2	16.6
ticket *	16.42	271.67	11.5	403.75	26.25	7.5
service	11.92	224.08	12.5	351.5	11	20.2
tour *	14.67	241.67	13	354.13	18	16.75
shop *	16.17	174.42	16.25	254.75	16	13.75
museum **	29.18	75.18	29.38	100.5	28.67	7.67
heritage	24.77	43.31	30	64.38	16.4	9.6
attraction	16.77	104.31	18.5	160.75	14	14

* Data are referred to 12 stadiums. ** Data are referred to 11 stadiums.

).

In the second part of the analysis, the dominant themes in European and Greek stadiums were considered separately. In other words, the themes that appeared at least once in the top 10 of the European stadiums ranking lists were considered themes of interest, followed by the themes that appeared at least once in the top 10 of the Greek stadiums ranking lists.

In the first case, the thematic framework consisted of 15 themes (

Table 6. Frequencies and average sentiment for all stadiums based on European stadiums.

Theme	Frequency	Total	Europe	Greece
team	8	3.163	3.206	1.443
place	8	2.465	2.582	0.922
game	8	3.21	3.25	1.475
experience	8	3.559	3.634	1.727
room	8	3.323	3.362	1.099
opportunity	8	3.479	3.517	1.634
fan	8	3.599	3.661	1.897
events	5	3.172	3.264	1.102
dining	5	3.737	3.758	1.693
seating	4	3.556	3.596	1.14
legacy	3	3.604	3.661	1.666
ticket	3	3.227	3.246	1.272
stadium	2	2.98	3.016	1.099
service	1	3.536	3.599	1.782
tour	1	3.269	3.324	0.943

), including “legacy”. Visitors to European stadiums showed a common interest in team, room, place, opportunity, game, fan, and experience. This trend suggests a balanced interest in multiple themes that shape the tourist experience at European stadiums. The themes events, dining, and seating were an important factor in shaping the experience at about half of the stadiums, whereas in a few stadiums, visitors showed interest in tickets, legacy, stadium, tour, and service. The differences recorded in the latter themes indicate organizational differences among stadiums’ management, as the characteristics of each stadium shape the opinion and interest of visitors.

In the second case, the thematic framework consists of 17 themes (

Table 7. Frequencies and average sentiment for all stadiums based on Greek stadiums.

Theme	Frequency	Total	Europe	Greece
team	5	3.163	3.206	1.443
place	5	2.465	2.582	0.922
game	5	3.21	3.25	1.475
experience	5	3.559	3.634	1.727
room	4	3.323	3.362	1.099
opportunity	4	3.479	3.517	1.634
fan	4	3.599	3.661	1.897
events	3	3.172	3.264	1.102
seating	3	3.556	3.596	1.14
legacy	2	3.604	3.661	1.666
stadium	2	2.98	3.016	1.099
service	2	3.536	3.599	1.782
tour	1	3.269	3.324	0.943
shop	1	3.558	3.601	1.943
museum	1	3.89	3.926	2.626
heritage	1	3.88	4.089	1.636
attraction	1	3.49	3.587	1.71

), including “legacy” as well. Visitors to Greek football stadiums show interest in topics related to team, place, game, and experience (these themes appeared in all 5 stadiums), room, opportunity, and fan (4 stadiums), legacy and events (3 stadiums), stadium, service, and seating (2 stadiums), and tour, shop, museum, heritage, and attraction (1 stadium). The strong interest in the team and the game indicates that visitors to Greek stadiums tend to consider themselves part of the team, especially during the game, while also paying attention to the physical environment (place), without neglecting the importance of the overall experience. Thus, visitors’ attention is mainly focused on the characteristics of the match day, and their impressions are shaped by these elements. Next, the themes of room, opportunity, and fan suggest that for visitors, spatial conditions are just as important as the available opportunities (e.g., shops, access, etc.), enhanced by the atmosphere and environment of the fans. Issues such as legacy, events, and service, which are mentioned in 3 of the 5 stadiums, suggest that visitors are also interested in specialized topics and emotions, while the themes of tour, shop, museum, heritage, and attraction are at the bottom of the ranking lists, indicating the distinct characteristics of each Greek stadium (age, owner, activities organized there, etc.).

Although the overall thematic structure of stadium visitors’ experiences is largely similar across European and Greek stadiums, there are clear differences in terms of the dominance of themes, the intensity of emotions, and the expression of criticism. Key thematic elements of the experience (team, place, game, and experience) are consistently present in both analyses, confirming their universal significance. However, their frequency is lower in Greek stadiums, suggesting a less uniform expression of these dimensions. The themes of participation and space (fan, room, and opportunity) are also discussed less consistently in Greek stadiums, although they maintain a positive sentiment when present. A notable deviation concerns hospitality: dining is moderately common and is evaluated very positively in European stadiums, but it is absent from Greek stadiums, suggesting differences in the integration or importance of food and beverage services. In contrast, Greek stadiums reveal specialized themes related to culture and cultural heritage (museum, heritage, and attraction), which are absent from European stadiums but are associated with some of the highest sentiment scores, suggesting a strong emotional response where they are found. In almost all common themes, the sentiment scores for Greek stadiums are consistently lower than those observed for European stadiums, regardless of the resulting thematic context (Figure 3). Although the empirical dimensions are largely comparable, the emotional intensity expressed in reviews of Greek stadiums appears to be more moderate. This difference is further reflected in the significantly higher number of unclassified reviews for Greek stadiums, which often consist of very short, slogan-like expressions referring to favorite teams (e.g., “PAOKARA,” “only AEK”), while reviews of European stadiums tend to be longer, more descriptive, and emotionally expressive. Overall, these findings suggest that regional differences in stadium experiences are due less to a lack of empirical data and more to differences in expressive culture, emotional engagement, service quality, infrastructure maturity, and visitor expectations. The differences in expressive culture among fans visiting European and Greek stadiums are presented in Figure 4, which shows a descriptive analysis of the reviews’ lengths (the red line indicates the average characters used).

4. Discussion

Existing online reviews regarding visitors at football stadiums reveal a wide variety of themes, beyond the match experience, which can shape a unique tourist experience, ranging from topics related to the team, the game, and the atmosphere created by the fans to functional and cultural elements and characteristics, such as service, legacy, dining, and shopping (Q1).

Visitors’ experiences at European stadiums were analyzed across a range of themes, essential for providing a holistic experience. In Greek stadiums, visitors’ interests vary and focus primarily on matchday experiences and the characteristics of each venue. The different emotional impact on satisfaction between visitors to European and Greek stadiums suggests differences in sports venues depending on their age, management, and ownership, and the products and services they offer. Topics such as dining, legacy, fans, experience, and services elicit the strongest positive emotional responses in European stadiums visitors, while museums, shops, and fan experiences elicit the most intense positive emotions in Greek ones (Q2).

The thematic and sentiment analyses provide a comprehensive understanding of the opinions, preferences, and prior experiences of visitors to European and Greek football stadiums. The well-developed and organized facilities at European stadiums impress visitors, while, in contrast, Greek stadiums receive relatively lower ratings and reactions, suggesting that despite interest in certain aspects, such as museums and shops, the overall experience remains low (Q3).

All European stadiums offer a well-organized and balanced experience, enhanced by complementary features such as quality services and various attractions, which influence the intensity of visitors’ emotions. Greek stadiums offer various services and products, usually to a limited extent, which leads to lower visitor satisfaction. Additionally, the excitement in Greek stadiums results from features such as fan and museums, mainly from the experience of match days (Q4).

Overall, the study’s findings underscore the importance of providing a multidimensional and well-integrated stadium experience to enhance visitor enjoyment and engagement, as well as to attract a wide range of visitors, fans, and tourists. Thus, this information can provide valuable guidance for managers and tourism professionals seeking improvements and attractive tourist experiences at football stadiums.

5. Conclusions

5.1. Policy and Managerial Implications

The findings have various implications for the studied stadiums’ managers and policymakers in the tourism sector. The significance of team-, game-, experience-, and fan-related themes (ranking/reviews: 2.38/1021.69, 3.77/732, 4.54/585.69 and 6.08/511.69 respectively—Appendix A, Table A3) underscores the importance of maintaining and enhancing the core athletic and emotional elements of stadium visits. Investments aimed at enhancing the atmosphere, fan engagement, and experience design are likely to yield consistently positive results across all destinations.

Themes related to backstage stadium experiences, such as tour, room, and events (ranking/reviews: 14.67/241.67, 7.62/524.15, and 9.62/307.46 respectively—Appendix A, Table A3), appear in relatively high rankings, generating positive feelings among visitors. The increased interest in behind-the-scenes activities at the studied stadiums, given that these are offered outside of match days, points the way to the creation of new services for visitors, expanding the activities offered at these entities.

Finally, we have consistently observed lower sentiment scores in all Greek stadiums. The indications of a different mode of expression among visitors to the Greek stadiums studied (Figure 4) reveal a different culture in the way services are evaluated by them, as well as in the way they express themselves through the online platforms used. The managers and administrators of Greek stadiums should take this into account in order to better understand visitors and offer more targeted and improved services.

5.2. Limitations—Future Work

The use of single-word thematic frameworks constitutes a limitation of the proposed analysis, as they lack the depth required to explain the underlying meaning or patterns across the entire dataset.

However, the severity of this limitation is reduced by allowing reviews to be assigned to multiple single-word themes. Furthermore, the results of this study confirm recent research employing single-word themes.

In future work, the researchers should focus on combining single-word themes with the proposed matching process to obtain results comparable to those obtained with phrasal themes. Furthermore, they may also consider incorporating multi-word or phrasal themes, as well as alternative topic-modeling methodologies, to unveil richer and more nuanced meanings.

In addition, data from a wider range of sources could be employed, and more diverse football stadiums could be studied.