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Abstract

Background: Entrepreneurship within sports has emerged as a growing field, emphasizing how psychological characteristics influence athletes’ professional development beyond competition. The Big Five Personality Traits (BFPTs) framework offers valuable insight into the cognitive and emotional foundations of entrepreneurial behaviors. Despite extensive research on university students, limited evidence exists on how these traits predict entrepreneurial intention (EI) and entrepreneurial attitude (EA) among university athletes, particularly through a gender-based lens.
Objective: This study aimed to examine the relationship between BFPTs, EI, and EA among male and female university football athletes and to explore gender-specific variations influencing entrepreneurial behavior.
Methods: A quantitative, cross-sectional research design was adopted involving 180 university football athletes (90 male and 90 female) aged 18–25 years (M = 21.47, SD = 1.99) from six universities renowned for their competitive football programs at inter-varsity, national, and international levels. Data were collected using the Big Five Inventory-10 (BFI-10) and the Entrepreneurial Intention Questionnaire (EIQ). Descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation, and hierarchical regression analyses were performed using IBM SPSS version 27.0.1 to assess predictive relationships among variables.
Results: The findings revealed significant gender-based differences in entrepreneurial predictors. Among male athletes, extraversion (β = –.402, p = .001) negatively predicted EA, whereas openness (β = .335, p = .005) positively predicted it. In female athletes, extraversion (β = –.295, p = .015) negatively and openness (β = .220, p = .065) positively predicted EA. Regarding EI, extraversion (β = –.415, p < .001) and neuroticism (β = –.317, p = .004) were significant negative predictors in males, while extraversion alone (β = –.275, p = .023) negatively predicted EI in females.
Conclusion: Personality traits, particularly extraversion, openness, and neuroticism, were found to significantly influence entrepreneurial orientation among university football athletes. Gender-specific differences suggest the importance of personalized, personality-based entrepreneurship training to enhance athletes’ post-sport career transitions.