The role of educational institutions in institutionalizing of the culture and etiquette of attending football stadiums

Educational institutions play a key role in the individuals’ socialization, transmission, and institutionalization of cultural and social values and norms. The present study aims to the role of educational institutions in institutionalizing the culture and etiquette of attending in football stadiums.  It employed an exploratory qualitative research design and the conventional content analysis technique. Thirteen deep semi-structured interviews were conducted with sports security and spectators' violent and aggression experts. The interviews were continued up to the theoretical data saturation. The collected data were analyzed using open and axial coding. The validity of coding was confirmed by two co-experts who reviewed and controlled the accuracy of the extracted codes and re-coding the interviews. The findings showed that educational institutions such as family, media, education, and higher education as four main themes and thirteen categories including cultural acceptance (education of children, families, students, teachers, professors, and citizens), modeling, and transmission of cultural-fan models (production of cultural content, awareness, and information, dissemination, and promotion of cultural models), academic promotion of fandom culture (development of cultural studies and enrichment of textbook content) and cultural co-thinking and networking (interaction and cooperation, and paving the path for the realization of cultural goals) are involved in the formation and institutionalization of culture and etiquette in football stadiums. It seems that paying more attention of educational institutions to the training of sports audiences, trying to modeling and transfer of cultural patterns, and having these institutions’ co-thinking and cooperation can develop people's culture and etiquette in football stadiums, reduce the level of violence and aggression of spectators and other people present in the stadiums, and prevent security incidents.