From streaming to visiting: How rural sports foster destination tourism

Rural sports event live streaming, such as the Village Super League in China, has substantially increased public attention and tourism interest. Yet, why strong online engagement often fails to translate into sustained offline tourism participation remains poorly understood. Existing research has largely emphasized event exposure and destination marketing while paying limited attention to how community interaction and evaluative processes shape online-to-offline (O2O) behavioral conversion. Drawing on the Village Super League as the empirical context, this study examines how different forms of psychological involvement gradually influence on-site viewing intention and on-site tourism intention through community engagement, audience satisfaction, and destination trust. Data were collected from 436 valid questionnaires and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and necessary condition analysis (NCA). The findings indicate that event involvement, live streaming involvement, and rural sports event live streaming situational involvement significantly predict community engagement. Among the three engagement dimensions, consumption and contribution significantly enhance audience satisfaction, whereas creation shows no significant effect. Audience satisfaction directly promotes both on-site viewing intention and on-site tourism intention, while destination trust significantly predicts on-site viewing intention but not on-site tourism intention. NCA further identifies key necessary conditions for achieving high levels of engagement and satisfaction, while indicating that necessary condition relationships vary across offline behavioral intention outcomes. This study extends the involvement framework and advances understanding of evaluative transfer in rural sports event live streaming by demonstrating how online interaction gradually develops into offline behavioral intentions through cumulative evaluations. The findings further contribute to research on online-to-offline behavioral conversion and offer practical implications for converting digital engagement into sustained offline tourism participation.