Introduction: Sport spectatorship is one of people's favorite pastimes. Besides attending games in person, sports fans use a wide variety of social media keep up with their favorite teams that leads to more identification and self-esteem. Fan identification refers to fans’ psychological connection to a sport team and, the construct of fan identification and its role in the behavior of sports fans have examined recently. So, the purpose of this research was to analyze the role of social media in football fan identification and collective self-esteem
Methodology: The research method was descriptive and survey that data were gathered through questionnaire. The statistical population was consisted the fans of Teraktorsazi football club in a match with the team of Qatar Lekhwiya Sports club that the number 248 were selected randomly. Structural equation models (SEM) were used to analyze the data.
Results: Results indicated that social media usage effect positively on fan identification (β=0.88). Also, fan identification affect significantly on collective self-esteem (β=1.03).
Discussion: Sports fans use social media to achieve and maintain their positive social identity through intragroup differentiation from rival teams and manage their feelings and self-esteem through associating with a successful team. According to the results can be said that the fans identification with a favorite team has a central role in promoting fans collective self-esteem and effect collective self esteem dimensions means how fans to assess themselves and other teams fans.