Background: Particularly in Europe, professional football offers considerable monetization potential for commercial investors, since nowadays the revenues of football teams amount to a hundred-million-dollar game. Consequently, football teams must foster team identification and ultimately team loyalty to successfully build a strong brand image in fans’ minds. In this regard, recently founded Red Bull owned German Bundesliga club RB Leipzig is of special research interest. Given the corporate team ownership of Red Bull, the question evolves whether fans’ team identification with RB Leipzig is sufficiently strong to have an influence on team loyalty.

Purpose: This master thesis aims to investigate team identification and team loyalty of low identified and high identified RB Leipzig fans in the context of Red Bull’s corporate team ownership.

Method: Following a positivist research philosophy, the authors deployed a deductive research approach. A quantitative research design was selected, resulting in a self-administered online survey as appropriate research instrument to verify or falsify the hypotheses developed throughout the theoretical background. The online survey was distributed to RB Leipzig fans in Germany via social media and e-mail resulting in 313 valid responses.

Conclusion: For both, low and high identified fan types, the authors’ research confirms the pre-existing antecedent model of team identification, with team-related antecedents and psychological antecedents as strongest antecedents, followed by environmental antecedents. Furthermore, the study revealed that corporate team ownership can be considered an additional antecedent. However, corporate team ownership was found to be the weakest antecedent, indicating that Red Bull’s corporate team ownership might be generally accepted by RB Leipzig fans. Besides, the findings suggest that for both, low and high identified fan types, team identification has an influence on two-sided team loyalty (i.e. behavioral team loyalty and attitudinal team loyalty).