From Fandom to Checkout: Artificial Intelligence and Immersive Commerce in Professional Sport

1. Introduction

Professional sport has become a continuous digital relationship rather than a sequence of isolated match-day encounters. Fans follow teams across social platforms, streaming services, mobile applications, online communities, ticketing systems, fantasy environments, games, and merchandise stores. Every touchpoint can deepen identification, generate data, and create commercial value, but every touchpoint can also introduce friction, surveillance concerns, or a sense that a culturally meaningful relationship has been reduced to a transaction. This tension is especially visible in club e-commerce. A conventional product grid is efficient, yet it often strips merchandise of the symbols, rituals, memories, and social meanings that make a jersey or scarf different from an ordinary consumer good.

Immersive interfaces and artificial intelligence (AI) appear to offer a way beyond that limitation. Three-dimensional (3D) environments can locate products in a virtual dressing room, stadium tunnel, trophy room, or locker room. Augmented reality (AR) can place a shirt, collectible, or branded object in the fan's immediate environment. Virtual reality (VR) can intensify spatial presence, while browser-based 3D can deliver some immersive benefits without requiring a headset. Conversational agents can answer questions, support discovery, translate content, explain product provenance, recommend sizes, and personalize journeys. Gamification and social co-presence can turn solitary browsing into playful or communal participation. Across retail research, these technologies have been linked to telepresence, enjoyment, perceived diagnosticity, control, engagement, and purchase-related responses [1,2,3,4,5]. AI research similarly shows that automated service can improve convenience and relevance, while simultaneously raising questions about disclosure, agency, competence, and consumer discomfort [6,7,8,9].

The sport context changes the meaning of these mechanisms. Team identification can make a purchase an act of self-definition, affiliation, and public signaling rather than merely a response to product utility. Brand-community research shows that shared consciousness, rituals, responsibility, and value-creating practices can bind consumers to one another and to a focal brand [10,11,12]. Sport research adds unusually persistent identity, emotional volatility, collective memory, rivalries, and event-driven demand [13,14,15]. A fan may therefore experience the same personalization as either welcome recognition or commercial intrusion, depending on who appears to speak, how the recommendation is framed, and whether it feels authentic to the club relationship.

Practice is moving faster than consolidated evidence. SL Benfica announced a browser-accessible immersive shop that reproduces a club locker-room environment and includes a multilingual AI assistant [16]. Fenerbahçe subsequently presented a 3D, AI-enabled virtual store with customizable merchandise and an embodied assistant [17]. The Charlotte Hornets had earlier launched a browser-based virtual fan store; the organization's description of it as an NBA first should be treated as a promotional claim rather than independent evidence [18]. These examples demonstrate technical and managerial feasibility, not causal effectiveness. Public announcements disclose little about incremental sales, repeat usage, accessibility, cost, privacy, or whether any novelty effect persists.

Academic knowledge is also fragmented. Immersive-retail studies usually examine generic products or unfamiliar brands; AI-service studies typically address banking, telecommunications, or general online retail; and sport-engagement research often focuses on social media, content, sponsorship, or attendance rather than a club-owned commerce journey. Reviews and meta-analyses of AR and VR retailing provide valuable syntheses [19,20,21], but they do not fully explain how technological affordances interact with team identification, fan community, authenticity, and event timing. Direct sport-commerce evidence is limited but not absent: studies of professional-team websites connect website-induced flow with satisfaction, loyalty, and word of mouth [22], while related work links e-service quality, team-brand strength, and image congruence to online trust, loyalty, and actual purchase frequency and connects licensed sport-merchandise website quality with flow, satisfaction, and shopping well-being [23,24]. These studies establish sport-specific experiential and relational mechanisms, but they predate immersive and generative-AI interfaces and do not test their joint effects in a club-owned commerce journey.

The most recent adjacent work sharpens rather than closes this gap. Studies in JTAER now examine persuasive and gamified fashion commerce on Roblox, the joint effects of explainable AI and AR in general immersive retail, and the privacy calculus surrounding GenAI-personalized social commerce [25,26,27]. Recent sport scholarship likewise recognizes AI's capacity to reshape engagement and the integrity of sport [28]. To our knowledge, however, no prior peer-reviewed study has jointly tested immersive store format and a disclosed AI shopping assistant in a professional-club merchandise journey while modeling team identification and observing verified purchasing outcomes.

Viewed as a socio-technical system, immersive sport commerce is not simply a retail interface. It is a joint configuration of technological affordances, fan identities and practices, organizational capabilities, commercial objectives, and governance arrangements. This perspective shifts attention from whether a club deploys AI or 3D environments to how human, technological, and organizational elements are aligned, experienced, and adapted over time. It also connects the paper to human-computer interaction concerns—including usability, accessibility, agency, transparency, and trust—while retaining the institutional specificity of professional sport.

This review addresses that gap by integrating electronic commerce, immersive retail, AI and conversational commerce, digital engagement, brand community, and sport-fan research. It asks four research questions:

RQ1. Which affordances of immersive and AI-enabled interfaces are most relevant to professional sport commerce?

RQ2. Through which experiential and relational mechanisms can those affordances influence fan behavior?

RQ3. Which fan, interface, market, and governance conditions strengthen, weaken, or reverse their effects?

RQ4. Which research designs and managerial metrics are required to distinguish novelty, substitution, and short-term conversion from durable relationship value?

The paper makes four contributions. First, it separates technologies from affordances: a headset, 3D website, AR application, or chatbot is not itself a causal explanation. Second, it joins experiential mechanisms such as telepresence, enjoyment, and control with relational mechanisms such as team identification, belonging, trust, authenticity, and psychological ownership. Third, it proposes an outcome ladder that distinguishes attention and exploration from conversion, willingness to pay, loyalty, advocacy, and responsible data exchange. Fourth, it treats governance as part of value creation rather than a compliance appendix. These elements form the Immersive Sport Commerce Conversion Framework (ISCCF) and eight testable propositions.

2. Review Design and Analytical Approach

2.1. Review Purpose and Design

An integrative theory-building review was selected because the focal problem spans research traditions that differ in terminology, theoretical assumptions, unit of analysis, technological configuration, outcome measurement, and methodological maturity. Integrative reviews are appropriate when heterogeneous empirical and conceptual literatures must be connected to develop a new explanatory perspective, provided that the purpose, boundaries, analytical categories, and interpretive decisions are made explicit [29,30,31]. The present review therefore uses prior literature not only to summarize what is known, but also to identify mechanisms, reconcile tensions, specify boundary conditions, and construct testable theoretical relationships [32].

The focal phenomenon is consumer-facing digital commerce associated with professional sport clubs, teams, leagues, or other identity-bearing sport brands, with particular emphasis on club-owned merchandise journeys. The unit of analysis is not a technology label such as AR, VR, 3D retail, or AI. It is the relationship through which a technology-enabled affordance shapes a fan experience, a relational mechanism, and a commercial or relationship outcome under identifiable contextual and governance conditions.

The purpose is conceptual integration rather than exhaustive enumeration, prevalence estimation, or effect-size aggregation. Source identification was therefore purposive and iterative, following the development of the focal concepts and relationships. Accordingly, this article is presented as an integrative theory-building review rather than as a systematic review, bibliometric census, or meta-analysis. It does not claim complete retrieval of every relevant publication, and PRISMA flow reporting and quantitative pooling are not used because no exhaustive intervention-oriented evidence sample was constructed [33].

2.2. Evidence Identification and Search Orientation

The search process was used to locate conceptually informative evidence across electronic commerce, immersive retail, AI and conversational commerce, consumer psychology, brand community, and sport management. Sources were identified through multidisciplinary scholarly indexes, publisher databases, Google Scholar, Crossref metadata, and PubMed where relevant, supplemented by backward and forward citation chaining. The search was updated through 20 August 2026. Foundational work published from 1992 onward was considered where it established constructs used in the framework, while particular attention was given to literature published from 2015 onward because consumer AR, mobile commerce, conversational AI, generative AI, and browser-based 3D environments developed rapidly during this period.

Three concept blocks guided the search:

• Immersive commerce: “immersive commerce”, “immersive retail”, “virtual store”, “virtual showroom”, “three-dimensional store”, “3D retail”, “virtual reality” or “augmented reality”, combined with “consumer”, “shopping”, “retail”, “purchase”, “telepresence”, “product experience”, or “customer experience”.
• AI-enabled commerce: “artificial intelligence”, “AI assistant”, “chatbot”, “conversational agent”, “conversational commerce”, “recommender”, or “personalization”, combined with “trust”, “disclosure”, “purchase”, “retail”, “service”, “customer experience”, or “data privacy”.
• Sport and fandom: “sport”, “sports”, “fan”, “club”, “team”, “league”, “team identification”, or “sport brand”, combined with “e-commerce”, “merchandise”, “digital engagement”, “social media”, “metaverse”, “virtual reality”, “loyalty”, or “purchase”.

Foundational searches were supplemented with mechanism terms—telepresence, flow, social presence, control, diagnosticity, authenticity, belonging, ownership, trust, privacy, accessibility, autonomy, and governance. Search terms were adapted to the syntax and vocabulary of each discovery source and expanded iteratively when relevant constructs, adjacent terminology, or influential studies emerged through full-text reading and citation chaining. Consistent with concept-centric review guidance, synthesis focused on relationships among ideas rather than separate author summaries [34].

Searches were conducted in English. Full-text relevance, rather than the appearance of an isolated keyword in a title or abstract, determined whether a source contributed to the synthesis. A source was retained when it helped define a focal construct, explain or qualify a relationship in the proposed conversion chain, identify a sport-specific boundary condition, document a relevant negative or backfire effect, or clarify a governance requirement. Because the purpose was concept development, the search process was not used to make frequency claims about the complete universe of publications.

2.3. Eligibility Boundaries and Evidence Roles

Peer-reviewed journal articles constituted the principal evidentiary base. Empirical studies, conceptual articles, and prior reviews were eligible when they informed at least one element of the proposed conversion chain: (a) a relevant technology-enabled affordance; (b) an experiential or relational mechanism; (c) a commercial, relationship, community, or data-exchange outcome; or (d) a boundary condition, friction, or governance risk. Relevant outcomes included product exploration, perceived diagnosticity, decision confidence, purchase intention or verified purchasing, willingness to pay, basket development, returns, repeat patronage, loyalty, advocacy, electronic word of mouth (eWOM), and willingness to disclose or retain preference data.

The focal application was club-owned merchandise commerce. Adjacent sport-commerce settings were considered only when they clarified a mechanism relevant to that application. General retail and digital-service studies were retained when their constructs could plausibly transfer to sport commerce, but such evidence was treated as contextual transfer rather than as direct proof of effects in professional sport. Sport studies were retained when they illuminated team identification, fan engagement, community belonging, authenticity, event timing, or other conditions through which a commerce interface may operate, even when merchandise purchasing was not the focal outcome.

The review excluded work concerned only with athlete performance, coaching, officiating, injury prediction, or back-office operations; broadcast technology without a consumer-engagement or commerce implication; purely engineering-focused prototypes without a consumer-relevant construct; betting-only research, except where it informed governance or vulnerable-consumer concerns; and cryptocurrency or non-fungible-token speculation detached from durable club relationship value.

Official club, league, regulatory, or technology-partner materials were eligible only for clearly delimited purposes. Club and partner pages were used to establish that an interface configuration had been publicly deployed, while regulatory texts were used to identify applicable governance principles. Practice materials were coded separately from peer-reviewed scholarship and were not treated as evidence of causal effectiveness, profitability, consumer welfare, or generalizability.

2.4. Concept-Centric Coding and Synthesis

The literature was analyzed using a concept-centric working matrix rather than a sequence of author-by-author summaries [34]. The coding fields were context; source and evidence role; technology; operative affordance; theoretical lens; interface stimulus; experiential mechanism; relational mechanism; outcome; moderator or boundary condition; friction or risk; study design; outcome type; and relevance to professional sport merchandise commerce. A source could inform more than one category. Technology and affordance were coded separately; for example, AR was recorded as a technology, whereas spatial embedding, augmentation quality, interactivity, self-referencing, and product visualization were recorded as affordances. The complete source-level coding matrix underlying the synthesis is provided in Supplementary Table S1.

Synthesis proceeded through three iterative analytical passes. The first identified recurring affordance–mechanism–outcome relationships across immersive retail and AI-enabled commerce. The second introduced sport-specific constructs capable of altering those relationships, particularly team identification, fan-community participation, authenticity, symbolic ownership, geography, and event timing. The third actively examined tensions, contradictory findings, and negative cases, including cognitive load, weak usability, inaccurate or uncanny agents, personalization discomfort, privacy concerns, accessibility barriers, coercive gamification, and short-lived novelty.

The unit of synthesis was a relationship between constructs rather than an individual publication. Convergence was interpreted more strongly when a similar relationship appeared across different technologies, methods, or contexts. Divergent findings were used to identify moderators or limits rather than being forced into a uniform direction. The framework was refined by asking whether each proposed link was conceptually distinct, measurable, conditionally bounded, and open to falsification. The resulting propositions are therefore theory-grounded expectations for future testing, not claims that the specified effects have already been established in professional-club e-commerce.

2.5. Evidence Interpretation and Transparency Safeguards

Because the evidence base combines experimental, observational, survey-based, conceptual, review, sport-engagement, and practice sources, a single numerical quality score would imply comparability that the literature does not possess. Instead, interpretive weight was guided by four dimensions: (1) evidence role—peer-reviewed empirical evidence, conceptual or review evidence, transferable contextual evidence, or practice illustration; (2) design warrant—the extent to which the design permits causal, longitudinal, or descriptive inference; (3) outcome proximity—verified behavior and operational outcomes versus attitudes, perceptions, or intentions; and (4) contextual directness—professional sport merchandise commerce versus adjacent sport engagement, general retail, or digital service settings.

Experimental or longitudinal evidence using observed behavior was given greater weight for causal and managerial claims than cross-sectional intention data. Conceptual work and evidence transferred from general retail were used to establish plausible mechanisms and theoretical boundaries, not to estimate effect magnitude in sport. Official implementation examples were used only to demonstrate deployment. Where the available evidence was indirect, heterogeneous, or inconsistent, the manuscript uses qualified language such as “suggests”, “is associated with”, “may”, or “is expected”.

Additional safeguards included checking DOI and publisher metadata for cited peer-reviewed sources; distinguishing purchase intention from verified purchasing; reserving causal language for designs capable of supporting it; explicitly separating commercial announcements from independent evidence; and searching for friction, null pathways, and backfire mechanisms alongside favorable effects. Source identification, coding, and synthesis were conducted collaboratively by the authors; because the process did not involve independent dual coding, no inter-rater agreement statistic was calculated, and the associated risk of interpretive judgment is acknowledged in the Limitations section.

Table 1 summarizes the design choices, evidence boundaries, coding dimensions, and validity safeguards applied in the integrative synthesis.

Figure 1 visualizes the concept-centric workflow through which immersive-retail, AI-enabled-commerce, and professional-sport evidence was identified, separated by evidence role, coded, and integrated.

3. Synthesis Results

3.1. Why Sport Commerce Is Not Ordinary e-Commerce

Online-store atmospherics influence perceptions and responses because interface cues operate as environmental stimuli rather than neutral containers [35,36]. Customer-experience research likewise emphasizes that value develops across journeys and touchpoints, not at checkout alone [37]. These principles apply to professional sport, but the underlying object is unusually symbolic. A club product may index geographic belonging, family history, status within a supporter group, a memorable season, or allegiance despite poor performance. The commercial object carries relational and autobiographical meaning.

Team identification captures the extent to which supporters perceive psychological connection with a team. Early work established meaningful differences between low- and high-identification fans [13], while subsequent sport research links identification and engagement to behaviors that extend beyond event consumption [14]. Digital environments broaden the behavioral repertoire: supporters create, share, comment, defend, recommend, and organize around the team, producing both direct and indirect value [15,38]. Social-media and virtual-community studies show that digital participation can reinforce involvement, attachment, and behavioral intentions, while outcomes depend on platform practice and supporter motives [39,40,41].

This creates both an advantage and a complication for immersive commerce. The advantage is a reservoir of pre-existing meaning. A virtual locker room does not need to manufacture relevance from nothing; it can activate symbols already embedded in fan identity. The complication is that high baseline attachment can obscure incremental technology effects. Highly identified supporters may already intend to purchase, producing ceiling effects on intention scales. Conversely, casual or geographically distant fans may have more room to respond to immersion but less initial motivation to enter. A rigorous study must therefore distinguish activation of identity, persuasion of marginal fans, facilitation of an intended purchase, and genuinely incremental demand.

Brand-community theory offers a second point of distinction. Communities are characterized by shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility [10]. Participation in brand communities can strengthen intentions and loyalty, but it can also create normative pressure or resistance when managerial actions appear inauthentic [12]. Community members generate value through practices such as social networking, impression management, engagement, and brand use [11]. Sport clubs possess many of these conditions before launching a digital commerce environment. The strategic issue is therefore not whether to “add community” as a feature, but whether the interface recognizes and supports existing fan practices.

3.2. Technology Is Not an Affordance

The literature often groups studies by AR, VR, metaverse, chatbot, or gamification. For explanation and design, however, it is more useful to ask what a configuration allows the user to perceive or do. Telepresence refers to a mediated sense of being in an environment [1]. Interactivity and vividness can contribute to that experience, but technological complexity alone does not guarantee it. A fast, controllable browser-based 3D room may produce a stronger sense of agency than a poorly rendered headset application. Conversely, a conventional product page can offer excellent diagnosticity, speed, and accessibility despite limited spatial immersion.

Immersive-retail research supports this affordance perspective. AR can embed digital content in the consumer's physical environment, improve product visualization, and alter service experience [3,42]. VR and virtual stores can affect engagement, attitudes, product examination, and choice through vividness, interactivity, and presence [4,5]. Interactive imagery can create mental simulation and product experience [2], while visual and functional control of virtual products can increase perceived diagnosticity and flow [43]. Virtual customer-service agents influence service encounters through social presence and personalization [44]. Yet reviews also document heterogeneous definitions, devices, products, and outcomes [19,21]. The common explanatory currency is not “being in VR”; it is the configuration of spatial immersion, control, sensory richness, product interaction, and fit with the task.

The same reasoning applies to AI. A recommender, text chatbot, embodied agent, voice assistant, and generative AI concierge differ in surface form, but relevant affordances include conversational agency, adaptive relevance, explanation, language translation, continuity, and service availability. AI can scale service and prediction [6,7], but consumers respond to how it enters the relationship. Disclosure that an agent is automated can change purchase responses [45], and the social cues of an anthropomorphic chatbot can shape satisfaction through perceived humanness and social presence [46]. AI should therefore be treated as a bundle of potentially valuable and potentially unsettling affordances.

Table 2 translates the principal technological configurations into the affordances, fan-relevant value mechanisms, candidate outcomes, and potential frictions used throughout the synthesis.

3.3. Spatial Immersion, Telepresence, and Product Experience

Spatial immersion can make a commerce journey more than an information-retrieval task. Telepresence theory suggests that mediated environments can shift attention from the physical setting toward a represented one [1]. In online commerce, flow and compelling experience depend on focused attention, perceived control, challenge–skill fit, and interactivity [47]. Digital engagement similarly combines cognitive and affective absorption with active participation [48]. Together, these perspectives explain why a 3D club store might produce value: it can focus attention, stage a meaningful environment, and invite exploration that a flat catalog does not.

The crucial mechanisms are separable. Telepresence concerns felt location; enjoyment concerns positive affect; control concerns the user's capacity to navigate and act; flow concerns absorbed, intrinsically rewarding interaction; and diagnosticity concerns whether the experience helps the consumer evaluate the product. A visually impressive environment may generate presence without improving diagnosticity. An AR jersey overlay may improve self-referencing but provide inaccurate sizing. A virtual trophy room may deepen emotional attachment while delaying product discovery. Outcomes therefore depend on matching the affordance to the job the fan is trying to complete.

Empirical studies in AR and virtual retail generally support benefits to experience, evaluation, and behavioral intention, while also showing that the pathway varies. AR service augmentation can create value by supporting interaction with products and environments [3]. Mobile AR may alter affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses through augmentation quality, informativeness, and enjoyment [49,50]. AR imagery can generate ownership-like responses and self-related processing [51], and virtual store formats can influence engagement and choice through their experiential qualities [4]. These findings provide plausible mechanisms for sport merchandise, but they should not be assumed to transfer without qualification. Team symbolism, high existing knowledge, counterfeit sensitivity, and event-timed urgency may change the balance between experience and efficiency.

Recent evidence extends this literature beyond intentions. An exploratory field-based VR study observed real-money purchases and linked active in-environment exploration with higher conversion, although its small self-selected sample and non-randomized design limit causal inference [52]. A 2 × 2 × 3 experiment likewise found that interactivity, virtual embodiment, and virtual-crowd cues shaped local presence, telepresence, social presence, playfulness, and impulse-buying urge [53]. These studies strengthen the behavioral basis for immersive commerce but remain outside professional sport and do not test AI assistance.

3.4. Interactivity, Agency, and the Friction Paradox

Interactivity can increase control and learning, but it also creates work. Rotating an object, walking through a virtual space, opening narrative elements, or configuring a jersey may heighten involvement when the user wants exploration. The same actions become obstacles when the user wants a known product before stock disappears. This produces a friction paradox: the interaction that creates experiential value can simultaneously reduce transactional efficiency.

Research on interactive and augmented interfaces repeatedly shows that usability, augmentation quality, and task–technology fit condition responses [54,55,56]. More vividness is not always better. Excess animation can increase cognitive load; spatial navigation can hide inventory; mandatory registration can interrupt flow; and a decorative avatar can occlude product information. A fan arriving through a post-match link may value speed more than discovery, while a distant supporter browsing during the off-season may welcome exploratory storytelling.

An effective architecture should therefore support progressive immersion. Consumers should be able to enter through a conventional, accessible route; opt into richer spatial or social layers; maintain a visible search and cart; and exit immersion without losing context. The design goal is not to maximize time spent in every case. It is to minimize unwanted effort while enabling meaningful exploration. This distinction also affects evaluation: dwell time can signal engagement or confusion. It should be interpreted alongside navigation paths, task completion, errors, add-to-cart behavior, and direct experience measures.

3.5. Conversational Agency, Personalization, and Social Presence

AI can intervene at multiple points in the journey: acquisition, discovery, evaluation, customization, service recovery, and retention. Marketing frameworks distinguish mechanical, thinking, and feeling-related contributions of AI and emphasize that task structure should determine where automation is appropriate [7]. In service encounters, AI can scale availability and consistency, but human and automated agency may need to be combined rather than treated as substitutes [6,57]. For a global club, multilingual guidance, size support, delivery explanations, and navigation across a large catalog are credible high-value applications.

Conversational agents add a social layer. Anthropomorphic cues and conversational style can enhance perceived humanness and social presence [46], while users' satisfaction and continuance depend on usefulness, service quality, and trust [58]. Social cues are not unconditionally beneficial. An agent that appears human but answers poorly, conceals its automated nature, or adopts an inauthentic club voice can violate expectations. Disclosure may reduce purchase responses in some conditions because consumers change how they interpret the encounter [45], yet non-disclosure creates ethical and regulatory risks and can cause a sharper trust loss if discovered. The managerial problem is not to hide automation, but to design disclosed AI that is demonstrably useful, bounded, and easy to escalate.

Personalization has a similar dual structure. Relevant recommendations can reduce search costs and make a large catalog manageable. They can also imply surveillance. The personalization paradox describes how data collection that enables relevance can simultaneously increase vulnerability and reduce response [59]. Privacy scholarship shows that consumer decisions are context-dependent, difficult to make under uncertainty, and influenced by how organizations frame control and benefits [60,61]. In sport, the data may include location, attendance, content consumption, ticket history, family status, and highly expressive affiliations. Combining those signals without clear necessity can feel more intrusive than ordinary product recommendation.

Current JTAER evidence makes these tensions especially salient. Explainable-AI and AR research in immersive retail indicates that interface transparency and augmentation can jointly shape trust and purchase decisions, while GenAI-personalized social-commerce research connects algorithmic trust and privacy calculus with purchase intention [26,27]. These adjacent studies support the governance paths in the ISCCF, but they do not address club identity, professional-sport merchandise, or verified transactions.

The appropriate standard is relational relevance, not maximum prediction. A recommendation should be explainable in a way consistent with the supporter relationship: selected size, chosen team collection, explicitly followed player, delivery region, or voluntarily saved preference. Sensitive inference and cross-context combination should be minimized. Fans should be able to understand why a suggestion appears, alter the preference, browse without personalization, and reach a human where consequences are significant.

3.6. Team Identification, Belonging, Authenticity, and Psychological Ownership

The experiential mechanisms above explain attention and interaction but not why the experience matters to a fan. The relational layer of the proposed framework consists of team identification, community belonging, trust, perceived authenticity, and psychological ownership. These constructs connect a momentary interface response to the continuing club relationship.

Team identification is both a prior state and an activated experience. A highly identified supporter brings attachment into the store; the environment can make that identity more salient through colors, histories, players, rituals, and social cues. The resulting purchase may function as identity enactment. Organizational-identification research explains why consumers build relationships with identity-relevant organizations [62], while sport research demonstrates the behavioral significance of identification and engagement [14]. Digital fan experiences can extend this relationship beyond the venue, particularly for supporters separated by geography or limited access [63,64].

Belonging operates at the fan-to-fan level. A commerce environment can display community creations, allow friends to visit together, connect purchases to collective milestones, or make match-day rituals visible. Brand engagement comprises cognitive, emotional, and behavioral investment [65,66], and online brand-community engagement can include enthusiasm, attention, absorption, interaction, and identification [67]. In sport, however, visible community signals require careful moderation. Rivalry, harassment, status hierarchies, and pressure to demonstrate “real” fandom can exclude newcomers or vulnerable users.

Authenticity concerns whether the experience feels consistent with the club's history, voice, conduct, and supporters. High visual fidelity is neither necessary nor sufficient. A stylized environment can feel authentic if it respects shared meanings; a photorealistic avatar can feel inauthentic if it uses generic sales language or invents club facts. This insight is consequential for generative AI. The agent should retrieve from controlled sources, distinguish official information from recommendation, avoid impersonating players without explicit authorization, and communicate uncertainty rather than fabricate an answer.

Psychological ownership refers here to a sense that an object is “mine” before legal ownership. Interactive product manipulation, self-referencing, personalization, and imagined use can intensify that state. AR and virtual product experience provide plausible routes [51,68]. Sport merchandise is particularly suited because names, numbers, memories, and supporter status make customization identity-relevant. Yet ownership-like feelings can be exploited through scarcity timers or default configurations. The same mechanism that increases attachment can also enable pressure, so its welfare implications depend on autonomy and transparency.

3.7. From Proximal Responses to an Outcome Ladder

Many immersive and AI studies end with attitudes or purchase intention. These outcomes are useful but insufficient for investment decisions. The ISCCF organizes outcomes into five levels:

• Access and exploration: entry, load success, search completion, product views, interaction depth, and assisted queries.
• Transaction: add-to-cart, conversion, revenue per visitor, basket composition, willingness to pay, return rate, and service cost.
• Relationship: repeat visits, retention, loyalty, satisfaction, and cross-touchpoint continuity.
• Community: contribution, referrals, eWOM, advocacy, and constructive fan-to-fan participation.
• Responsible data exchange: voluntary preference saving, consent quality, revocation behavior, perceived control, and trust.

The ordering is not a claim that every user must progress linearly. It is an evaluation discipline. A design may improve exploration but not conversion; increase conversion but also returns; generate an initial sales spike without retention; or obtain more data while lowering trust. The outcome ladder prevents a single favorable proxy from standing in for value.

Sport-specific timing further complicates measurement. Demand fluctuates around fixture releases, transfers, victories, defeats, championships, player milestones, and product drops. An immersive-store launch timed to a trophy celebration may appear effective because demand would have risen anyway. Experiments and quasi-experiments should include contemporaneous controls, pre-period behavior, inventory availability, traffic source, and campaign exposure. Incrementality—not gross revenue—is the appropriate test.

3.8. Boundary Conditions and Backfire Effects

Five groups of moderators recur across the integrated evidence.

Fan characteristics. Team identification, product involvement, prior club knowledge, technology readiness, privacy sensitivity, and shopping goal can change the direction or magnitude of effects. High identification may amplify emotional response while reducing the marginal lift in purchase intention. Low-identification consumers may appreciate functional AI but ignore heritage content.

Interface characteristics. Speed, navigability, device fit, accessibility, information quality, AI accuracy, disclosure, and human escalation determine whether affordances are realized. A feature unavailable on lower-end devices is not an affordance for those users. Accessibility should include keyboard navigation, screen-reader semantics, captions, contrast, reduced motion, language, and a robust 2D path.

Product characteristics. Identity expressiveness, uncertainty, customization, scarcity, price, and returnability influence value. AR or 3D may be more useful for configurable or high-uncertainty products than for familiar goods.

Market and cultural conditions. Club scale, supporter geography, payment infrastructure, language, data expectations, and local norms matter. A globally distributed fan base may gain more from multilingual assistance and virtual access; a locally concentrated base may place greater weight on integration with venue retail.

Temporal conditions. Match outcomes, season stage, product launch, transfer events, and novelty affect both emotion and demand. The same interface may perform differently in a celebratory period and after a disappointing result.

Backfire can occur through four paths. First, performance failure occurs when load, navigation, fit visualization, or AI accuracy is poor. Second, expectation violation occurs when a humanlike or club-branded agent is generic, deceptive, or incorrect. Third, autonomy threat occurs when gamification, scarcity, or personalization feels coercive. Fourth, identity violation occurs when commercial design trivializes a ritual, excludes a supporter group, or misuses player and heritage symbols. These pathways help explain why technology richness can have nonlinear or negative effects.

3.9. Governance as a Value Mechanism

Privacy, transparency, consumer autonomy, algorithmic bias, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and the protection of minors are frequently treated as external constraints. In relational commerce they also determine whether fans trust the interface and permit continuity. Trust in e-commerce depends on beliefs about competence, benevolence, integrity, and institutional safeguards [69,70]. An AI assistant that is accurate but opaque may satisfy competence while weakening integrity. A highly personalized journey that lacks meaningful control may increase immediate relevance but reduce willingness to return.

The regulatory environment reinforces these design requirements. The General Data Protection Regulation establishes principles including lawfulness, fairness, transparency, purpose limitation, data minimization, and rights related to personal data [71]. The European Union Artificial Intelligence Act introduces risk-based obligations and transparency requirements for specified AI uses [72]. This review does not provide legal advice; the strategic point is that privacy and AI governance should be translated into observable design choices: visible disclosure, constrained data collection, clear purposes, preference controls, audit logs, content provenance, model testing, escalation routes, and age-appropriate safeguards.

Minors warrant particular attention because clubs attract young supporters and may combine gaming, rewards, influencers, and merchandise. Emerging sport-AI scholarship identifies children and adolescents as particularly vulnerable to targeted content, gamification, and data-driven commercial influence [28], while analysis of immersive fashion commerce on Roblox shows how monetization cues can be embedded in progression, status, and habitual return [25]. Variable rewards, countdowns, and social-status mechanics can therefore exert disproportionate pressure. A responsible system should avoid exploitative design, distinguish play from purchasing, use age-appropriate language, obtain required consent, and provide guardian controls where applicable. Governance-by-design protects consumer welfare and reduces the chance that a short-term conversion tactic damages the club's long-term legitimacy.

4. The Immersive Sport Commerce Conversion Framework

4.1. Architecture of the ISCCF

The Immersive Sport Commerce Conversion Framework (ISCCF) organizes the synthesis into a conditional conversion architecture. The word “conversion” includes both commercial and relational transformation: technology must first become a usable affordance; the affordance must produce an experience; that experience must acquire identity and trust relevance; and only then may it influence outcomes. Each arrow is an empirical question rather than an assumed effect.

The framework contains five layers:

• Technology-enabled affordances: spatial immersion, interactivity and control, conversational agency, adaptive personalization, and gamified/social co-presence.
• Fan-experience mechanisms: telepresence, enjoyment, flow, perceived control, diagnosticity, relevance, and social presence.
• Relational mechanisms: activated team identification, community belonging, authenticity, trust, and psychological ownership.
• Outcome ladder: exploration, transaction, relationship continuity, community value, and responsible data exchange.
• Conditional system: fan, interface, product, market, and temporal moderators operate alongside governance filters concerning privacy, transparency, autonomy, bias, accessibility, and minors.

A feedback loop connects outcomes to future personalization. Behavioral data can improve relevance, but only when the data exchange is legitimate, proportionate, secure, and understandable. The loop is therefore filtered by governance rather than treated as an unrestricted optimization cycle.

Figure 2 presents the resulting ISCCF, linking technology-enabled affordances to experiential and relational mechanisms, conditional outcomes, and governance filters.

4.2. Propositions

Proposition 1: The immersive mediation pathway. Spatial immersion should influence commercial outcomes primarily through experienced telepresence and enjoyment rather than through technical richness directly. Presence research and immersive retail studies support the importance of mediated “being there” and experiential response [1,4,5]. In sport, symbolic environmental cues may make the mediated space identity-relevant, strengthening the pathway. However, visual complexity without presence or relevance should not improve outcomes.

P1. Spatial-immersion affordances will increase product exploration and purchase-related outcomes indirectly through telepresence and enjoyment; this indirect effect will be stronger when environmental cues are recognizably and authentically connected to the club.

Proposition 2: Control creates value only under usable task fit. Interactivity can support mental simulation, diagnosticity, and flow, but it can also impose effort [2,47,54]. Control should therefore mediate positive effects only when navigation is responsive and congruent with the shopping task. Under urgency or poor usability, the same interaction can reduce completion.

P2. Interactivity will improve product exploration and decision confidence through perceived control, flow, and diagnosticity when task–interface fit is high, but its effect will weaken or reverse as navigation cost, latency, or cognitive load increases.

Proposition 3: Disclosed conversational agency. AI assistants can reduce search cost and create social presence, while disclosure, competence, and authenticity shape trust [9,45,46]. An automated agent's club identity increases the stakes of failure because fans may attribute its conduct to the organization.

P3. A clearly disclosed and demonstrably competent AI assistant will improve search completion and conversion through perceived relevance and social presence; inaccurate, undisclosed, or inauthentic agency will reduce trust and can produce negative indirect effects.

Proposition 4: Complementarity is conditional, not automatic. Immersion and AI address different constraints: immersion can increase experience and contextual meaning, while AI can reduce search and explanation costs. Combining them may therefore produce complementarity. Yet an embodied AI agent inside a complex 3D environment can also increase distraction, uncanniness, and processing demand.

P4. Immersive affordances and conversational AI will interact positively when the assistant reduces spatial search cost and reinforces environmental meaning, but the interaction will become null or negative when embodiment, interruption, or personalization creates overload, uncanniness, or autonomy threat.

Proposition 5: Identification asymmetry. Team identification is expected to strengthen emotional and identity-related responses, but it need not create the largest incremental transaction effect. Highly identified fans may already have high baseline purchase propensity. Lower-identification fans may show larger proportional gains from functional facilitation, while high-identification fans show larger gains in advocacy or psychological ownership.

P5. Team identification will strengthen the effects of authentic immersive cues on belonging, psychological ownership, and advocacy, but its moderation of incremental conversion will be nonlinear because high-identification fans exhibit higher baseline purchase propensity and potential ceiling effects.

Proposition 6: Community converts experience into advocacy. Co-presence and community practices can extend an individual experience into a collective one [10,11,67]. In sport, shared rituals and supporter-generated content can make commerce an expression of belonging. Poor moderation, status pressure, or rivalry hostility can instead discourage participation.

P6. Social co-presence and community affordances will influence loyalty and eWOM through belonging and perceived authenticity, with positive effects contingent on inclusive participation rules and effective moderation.

Proposition 7: Gamification has a temporal split. Gamification can support engagement and exploration, but recent VR-commerce evidence also links gamified exploration, embodiment, and virtual-crowd cues to impulse-related responses, while self-determination theory cautions that externally controlled rewards may undermine intrinsic motivation [52,53,73,74]. Youth-oriented immersive fashion commerce further demonstrates how gamified progression and status can embed monetization throughout the experience [25]. Short-term behavioral lift should not be equated with durable attachment.

P7. Gamified commerce will increase short-term exploration and impulse-related outcomes, whereas long-term loyalty will improve only when mechanics support autonomy, competence, and club-relevant participation rather than relying on pressure, variable rewards, or extrinsic incentives alone.

Proposition 8: Governed personalization creates durable value. Personalization can improve relevance while generating privacy vulnerability [59,61]. Transparent purpose, data minimization, and meaningful control should change governance from a cost into a trust mechanism.

P8. Transparency, data minimization, preference control, and accessible non-personalized alternatives will strengthen the positive effect of personalization on trust, repeat patronage, and voluntary data exchange; intrusive inference and weak control will weaken or reverse these outcomes even when immediate conversion increases.

Table 3 consolidates the cross-domain evidence base and identifies the sport-commerce questions that remain unresolved.

Table 4 operationalizes the eight propositions by pairing each core relationship with a preferred empirical design and primary outcome set.

4.3. Research Agenda

The propositions imply a research program that moves beyond isolated intention surveys.

First, test incrementality in live club stores. The most informative initial design is a 2 × 2 field experiment crossing conventional 2D versus immersive 3D presentation with no AI versus a disclosed AI assistant. Random assignment should occur before interface exposure, with identical assortment, pricing, promotion, stock, and checkout. Outcomes should include load success, search paths, add-to-cart, verified purchase, revenue per eligible visitor, return or cancellation, service escalation, and repeat behavior. Experience and relationship measures should be collected from a subsample to test mediation without burdening every customer.

Second, measure the right moderator. Team identification should be measured before or independently of the stimulus and modeled continuously, including possible nonlinear effects. Researchers should separate identification from purchase frequency, account tenure, geographic distance, and category involvement. A highly identified but low-income fan is not equivalent to a frequent buyer, and purchase history alone is not a valid proxy for attachment.

Third, distinguish novelty from learning. Studies should include repeat exposures and delayed outcomes. Novelty may increase initial exploration while experienced users later choose the efficient path. Conversely, an AI assistant may become more valuable as consumers learn its capabilities and save preferences. Interrupted time series, stepped-wedge rollouts, or longitudinal panels can identify adaptation better than single-session designs.

Fourth, study cross-touchpoint journeys. Immersive commerce may substitute for a mobile page, complement a physical shop, or drive later purchases through another channel. Club-level evaluation should use persistent but privacy-respecting assignment and report total incremental behavior across channels, not claim failure when checkout occurs elsewhere. Venue visits, content engagement, customer service, and returns may reveal value or cost omitted from the focal session.

Fifth, evaluate heterogeneity and accessibility. Device performance, disability, age, language, digital confidence, and market infrastructure must be treated as design variables. Researchers should report who could load and use the experience, not only outcomes among successful entrants. A 3D environment with a high conversion rate among a small, technically advantaged subset can underperform a broadly accessible interface at population level.

Sixth, test governance interventions. Disclosure wording, explanations, data controls, memory duration, human escalation, and non-personalized alternatives can be experimentally varied. Outcomes should include comprehension, perceived control, trust, consent quality, and subsequent revocation—not just acceptance clicks. Studies involving younger fans should use age-appropriate protocols and ethics review.

Seventh, compare products, events, and cultures. A customized jersey, limited championship item, routine accessory, and high-priced memorabilia present different uncertainty and identity value. Clubs also differ in history, supporter ownership, commercialization norms, and global reach. Multi-club studies should therefore test measurement invariance and context effects rather than pool all supporters under a generic “sports fan” category.

The novelty of this agenda lies in the joint causal test. Taken together, the literature now documents verified purchasing in immersive retail and relational mechanisms in sport e-commerce, but it still does not establish how immersive presentation and disclosed AI assistance jointly influence verified purchasing and fan relationships in professional-club stores [23,24,52,53]. To our knowledge, no prior peer-reviewed study has jointly manipulated a 2D versus 3D professional-club merchandise store and the presence of a disclosed AI shopping assistant while modeling team identification and observing verified purchasing outcomes. This statement is deliberately narrow. It does not claim that no sport organization has tested such variants internally, nor that no adjacent study exists; it identifies an unaddressed combination in the public peer-reviewed literature reviewed here.

5. Discussion

5.1. Theoretical Contributions

The first contribution is an affordance-to-relationship conversion architecture. Existing research often moves directly from a technology label to an outcome: AR increases intention, VR increases engagement, or AI increases service performance. The ISCCF inserts the missing mechanisms. A technical configuration must deliver an affordance; the affordance must produce an experience; and the experience must become relationally meaningful before it can generate durable sport-commerce value. This architecture makes failed implementation theoretically informative. A null result can be located at the affordance, experience, relationship, or outcome stage rather than attributed vaguely to “VR” or “AI”.

From a socio-technical perspective, the ISCCF explains value as an emergent property of alignment rather than as a direct effect of technological sophistication. Spatial immersion, conversational AI, personalization, and gamification create value only when they fit fan goals, club routines, service capacity, accessibility requirements, and governance controls. Misalignment at any of these levels can convert richness into friction, relevance into surveillance, or social presence into inauthenticity. The framework therefore links human-computer interaction mechanisms to organizational implementation and relational outcomes within an identity-intensive market.

The second contribution is the distinction between experiential intensity and relational authenticity. Immersion can intensify experience, but intensity is not equivalent to authenticity. A high-fidelity space can feel generic; a lightweight interface can feel deeply club-specific. Conversational AI increases this distinction because the agent's wording, knowledge boundaries, and disclosure become part of the organization's voice. Relational authenticity is expected to depend on consistency with shared history, transparent agency, accurate knowledge, and respect for fan practices.

Third, the review identifies conditional complementarity between immersion and AI. Immersion can increase exploration and meaning but also search cost. AI can reduce that cost, explain products, and tailor navigation. The technologies should complement one another when the agent functions as a guide to the environment. They can interfere when both compete for attention or when embodiment magnifies uncanniness. This moves theorizing beyond additive “more technology” assumptions and creates a clear interaction hypothesis.

Fourth, the framework introduces identification asymmetry. Team identification should strengthen identity activation, belonging, ownership, and advocacy, yet it may not yield the largest incremental conversion effect. High-identification supporters often enter with high baseline propensity, leaving limited headroom on intention or purchase. The framework therefore predicts different effects by outcome: stronger relational mediation among highly identified fans and potentially larger functional conversion lift among moderate or distant fans. This helps reconcile an apparently weak sales interaction with a meaningful fan-relationship effect.

Fifth, the outcome ladder separates attention, transaction, relationship, community, and data value. Much digital-commerce research treats intention or dwell time as a sufficient endpoint. For sport organizations, these metrics can be misleading. Time may represent confusion; an impulse sale may produce a return; community participation may create advocacy without immediate revenue; and data acquisition may undermine trust. Multi-level evaluation aligns theory with the continuing nature of fandom.

Finally, governance is theorized as an endogenous mechanism. Transparency, control, accessibility, and data minimization do not merely constrain conversion; they can support competence, integrity, and benevolence beliefs that sustain trust. Conversely, intrusive inference, deceptive anthropomorphism, inaccessible design, or exploitative gamification can interrupt the conversion chain. This proposition is particularly important because professional sport clubs trade on institutional identity and often maintain relationships across generations.

5.2. Interpretation of Current Practice

The recent Benfica, Fenerbahçe, and Charlotte Hornets examples show that browser-based virtual stores and AI-supported fan journeys are operational possibilities [16,17,18]. The cases also illustrate a lower-friction, browser-based implementation path than headset-dependent virtual environments. This path is theoretically consistent with the affordance view: spatial storytelling and conversational assistance can be delivered without maximizing hardware immersion.

The cases should nevertheless be read cautiously. Public launch material emphasizes novelty, multilingual reach, brand experience, and technical features. It does not reveal the counterfactual—what the same users would have done in an optimized conventional store. Nor does it disclose acquisition cost, repeat use, error rates, accessibility, privacy comprehension, or incremental profitability. Scholarship can add value precisely by building independent evaluation designs that distinguish feasible deployment from effective and responsible deployment.

5.3. Implications for Digital Sport and Electronic Commerce Research

For digital sport research, the framework directs attention from content engagement toward owned commerce infrastructure. Social media remains important, but clubs do not fully control platform rules, data access, or monetization. A club-owned immersive store can become a relationship space, provided that it does not simply reproduce platform-like surveillance or pressure. This raises questions about how fan engagement transfers across owned and external touchpoints and how commercial encounters reshape perceptions of club authenticity.

For AI research, the setting foregrounds delegated voice. A chatbot in a generic store represents a retailer; an AI assistant wearing club colors may be interpreted as speaking for a cherished institution. Errors, recommendations, humor, and persuasion can therefore have relational effects beyond service satisfaction. Future research should examine attribution: when do users blame the agent, the technology supplier, the commerce partner, or the club?

6. Managerial Implications

6.1. Begin with the Fan Job, Not the Technology

Clubs should identify the fan problem before selecting a format. Distant supporters may need access to symbolic spaces and multilingual guidance. New supporters may need product explanation. Existing buyers may need rapid reordering, accurate sizes, and delivery clarity. Collectors may value provenance and rich product inspection. Social groups may want shared discovery. A single maximally immersive interface is unlikely to serve all jobs.

The first design decision should be the minimum useful affordance. If the need is fit confidence, AR or improved sizing may outperform a virtual venue. If the need is discovery within a large catalog, conversational search may be sufficient. If the strategic goal is global heritage engagement, a browser-based 3D environment may be appropriate. Technology selection should follow this diagnosis.

6.2. Build Progressive Immersion and Preserve an Accessible Route

An immersive layer should be optional, fast, and reversible. Users should retain search, category access, price, stock, delivery, cart, and checkout context. The store should offer a fully functional 2D alternative rather than treating it as a degraded fallback. Accessibility should be tested from the start, including keyboard use, screen-reader semantics, contrast, reduced motion, captions, language, and lower-performance devices.

Performance budgets matter. Teams should define maximum load time, memory use, interaction delay, and failure thresholds by device segment. The system should degrade gracefully when 3D assets fail. Managers should monitor eligible-entry rate and technical abandonment before interpreting downstream conversion.

6.3. Give AI a Bounded, Disclosed Service Role

The assistant should have a clear identity and scope: it is an automated shopping assistant, not a player, coach, or human supporter. High-value tasks include product retrieval, availability, delivery, returns, size guidance based on approved information, translation, and navigation. Generative answers about club facts or product provenance should be grounded in controlled sources and carry uncertainty where appropriate.

Human escalation should be visible. The organization should maintain a reviewed knowledge base, prohibited topics, incident logging, answer-quality sampling, and a rapid correction process. Recommendations should be distinguishable from factual answers and paid placements. A club-branded agent should never invent quotations, impersonate individuals, or exploit recent emotional events to pressure purchasing.

6.4. Personalize Proportionately

Clubs should adopt a hierarchy of data use. Start with session context and voluntarily stated preferences; add first-party purchase or size information when necessary and expected; avoid sensitive inference and unrelated cross-context data. Explain recommendations in plain language and allow users to edit or reset the basis for personalization. A “browse without personalization” option can function as a trust feature, not merely a privacy concession.

Consent should be measured by comprehension and control rather than acceptance rate. Useful operational indicators include the share of users who understand the purpose, use preference controls, revoke consent, or continue under a non-personalized path. Data retention and model memory should have explicit limits.

6.5. Experiment for Incrementality

Launch metrics should be defined before rollout. A practical scorecard combines:

• Technical access: load success, device coverage, latency, crashes, accessibility completion.
• Journey quality: search success, navigation errors, assisted resolution, task time, direct satisfaction.
• Commercial incrementality: conversion lift against a concurrent control, revenue per eligible visitor, margin, return rate, service cost, and channel substitution.
• Relationship value: repeat use, retention, loyalty, trust, and perceived authenticity.
• Community value: referrals, constructive contribution, eWOM, moderation incidents.
• Governance quality: disclosure comprehension, consent quality, opt-out and revocation, AI error severity, bias indicators, escalation success, and incidents involving minors.

Randomized rollout is preferable when feasible. At minimum, teams should use holdouts or phased deployment and control for campaigns, match outcomes, traffic sources, stock, and product drops. Gross sales after a launch are not evidence of causal return.

6.6. Organize for Lifecycle Governance

Immersive and AI-enabled commerce is not a one-off campaign asset. It requires collaboration among commerce, fan engagement, brand, customer service, accessibility, data protection, information security, legal, and youth-safeguarding roles. Ownership should cover model changes, 3D content updates, product information, supplier dependencies, incident response, and sunset criteria.

Table 5 converts these principles into a staged implementation roadmap, from diagnosis and prototyping to governance, experimentation, integration, and scaling.

7. Limitations

This review has six main limitations. First, the integrative theory-building design prioritizes conceptual breadth and explanatory development over exhaustive database coverage. Source identification was purposive and iterative; consequently, the review cannot establish that every relevant publication was retrieved, and the relative frequency of cited themes should not be interpreted as their prevalence in the complete literature. The English-language boundary may also underrepresent club innovation and fan practices in non-English-speaking markets.

Second, source identification, coding, and framework development were conducted collaboratively by the authors, but the process did not involve independent dual screening or coding. Explicit coding dimensions, bibliographic verification, evidence-role separation, examination of negative cases, and the source-level evidence matrix improve transparency, but they do not eliminate interpretive judgment or selection bias. Future updates should incorporate independent dual screening and coding, report the reconciliation process, and maintain an updated source-level evidence matrix for external scrutiny.

Third, the included literatures are heterogeneous. Technologies, products, samples, scales, and outcomes vary, preventing defensible effect-size pooling. Fourth, direct peer-reviewed evidence on immersive, AI-enabled professional-club merchandise stores remains limited. Several arguments transfer mechanisms from general retail or digital service research and then specify why sport may moderate them. The propositions therefore require direct tests.

Fifth, technology and regulation are changing quickly. The capabilities, costs, and public understanding of browser-based 3D, generative AI, and spatial interfaces may change before some proposed studies are completed. The framework addresses this risk by centering affordances and mechanisms rather than particular vendors, but periodic updating will still be necessary.

Sixth, official club examples are illustrative and partly promotional. They establish visible deployment but do not provide independent outcome evidence. No claim about causal effectiveness, profitability, or leadership should be inferred from their inclusion. Future research would benefit from pre-registered collaborations with clubs that permit publication of null and adverse results as well as positive ones.

8. Conclusions

Immersive and AI-enabled commerce offers professional sport clubs a plausible route from a functional online catalog to a richer fan relationship space. The opportunity does not arise from 3D, AR, VR, or AI labels alone. It arises when technology produces usable affordances; affordances generate telepresence, control, relevance, diagnosticity, or social presence; and those experiences become meaningful through identification, belonging, authenticity, trust, and psychological ownership.

The ISCCF makes this conversion conditional. Team identification can amplify relational value while masking incremental sales effects. Interactivity can create flow or friction. AI can guide a complex environment or magnify uncanniness. Gamification can prompt exploration or undermine autonomy. Personalization can support relevance or communicate surveillance. Governance and accessibility therefore belong inside the value model.

For scholars, the immediate priority is a program of live, longitudinal, and cross-market tests using verified behavior rather than intention alone. For clubs, the practical standard is incremental, inclusive, and governable value—not novelty. A well-designed experience should help a fan accomplish a meaningful job, preserve choice, respect the club relationship, and remain credible after the launch attention has passed. That is the point at which immersive sport commerce moves from spectacle to strategy.