Sports Fandom

 

Big Idea

            The fact that (certain) people are willing/compelled  to watch sports, pay money, take time and develop loyalties is something that can be theorized with nearly every major branch of social theory.    

 

History of Fandom

           Horse Racing and Boxing are the first great mass spectator sports, by the middle of the 19th century

       What they both have in common is gambling

       Almost from the start, seating (like theater before them) is divided into upper class and working class sections

           By the late 19th century/early , it is baseball in the US and football in the UK which become the huge draws across classes

       Institution of 5 ½ day work weeks give the opportunity for time off

       But technology also helps

      Telegraph is able to transmit scores and reports across country

      Mass transit allows spectators from a wider area to get the stadium

      Steel/Concrete construction allows ever bigger stadiums to be built

       In the UK, with thousands of soccer clubs, rooting interest becomes intensely local

      London, for example, has around 10 major clubs; Manchester has two

 

History of Fandom  (cont.)

            But each country also has its more upper-class spectator sports

        Cricket in particular is frequented by people who have the ability to sit all day in the stands and watch

        In the US (especially before the GI Bill, which allowed all WWII veterans to go to college)  college football was the equivalent sport

       Post GI-Bill, it becomes the center of fandom for places without professional teams (e.g. Alabama, Oklahoma, Iowa, Nebraska) and thus very territorialized at statewide (or city wide) levels

        Tennis, golf, polo, yachting and all of the other sports elites participated in as well as watched,

 

History of Fandom (cont.)

            The second Madison Square Garden in New York City (built by a syndicate including JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, PT Barnum, and William Astor) was the first of the mega covered arenas in 1890

        Used first for boxing and circus, before basketball and ice hockey moved in.

       The fourth MSG is the current building

            Although the British in particular left cricket stadium and race tracks behind in their colonies, one of the first priorities for many newly independent regimes was a national stadium (particularly for football, built on the model of London’s Wembley Stadium)

        Many of Latin America’s great stadiums – Brazil’s Maracanã,  Mexico’s Estadio Azteca, Argentina’s El Monumental  date from the late 1930’s to the 1960’s.

            In the 1990s, thanks to the Baltimore Orioles Camden yards, new downtown stadiums were seen as a key to redevelopment

        Its been a mixed bag (more on that later)

 

History of Fandom (cont.)

            One of the big ways fandom is shown is by wearing/displaying team colors

        This originally is most prominent in elite schools initially, in both the UK and US (Harvard Crimson, Yale blue, Eton blue, etc…)

        However, most people would dress up in nice clothes to attend games until after WWII, so the most common way to show support in the UK was with the team scarf

       Originally, fans knit them in team colors; eventually factories would add team crest and team name; by 1960’s teams began selling them on their own, making “special editions” to mark big matches.

        With the switch to more casual clothes in the 1960s, more people wore sports t-shirts and children would wear replica jerseys (which eventually adults felt they could wear too).

 

History of Fandom (cont.)

            The sports team flag/poster /pennant became  a staple of home decoration; first in children’s rooms, but then later in prominent areas of the home.

            In the US, fandom also centered on baseball card collecting.

       The phenomenon emerged in the late 1800s, when companies would use pictures of famous ball players on their business cards

      Eventually tobacco companies started using the card to advertise cigarettes/protect the cigarettes in their pack
»    Candy companies moved in too, and eventually the printing of cards became more lucrative than the candy (by the mid-1980s, the gum façade went away entirely)

 

Hooliganism

           A small subset of soccer fans (usually working class, pre middle age males) engage in organized violence against fans of other teams

       They are variously called “ultras”, “casuals”; their groups in England are called “firms”

           As Hughson and Poulton note, their influence on popular imagination far outpaces their admittedly annoying, bad (but small) impact

       Countless films and TV shows, like Green Street, Football Factory, the Firm,  sort of villify/romanticizes the street toughs.

      They are also linked with skinhead culture/the far-right National Party; but that is rarely the case anymore (even if many are xenophobic).

       In general, they only target others like themselves, who are also looking to fight (use mobile phones to do it)

           Hooliganism is just the most exotic form of fan on fan violence, which in many parts of the world is fueled by alcohol

       Some countries like Brazil instituted a ban; in the US, most stop beer sales once ¾ of the game is completed

 

Media

            More in a later lecture, but obviously media and sports fandom go together

        Baseball was helped by being an exceptionally good radio game (players start from fixed position, so easy to describe)

        Television made all the difference for fandom (especially American football); seeing the game live either at home or at a bar made for a much more engaging experience

       As screen resolution improved, sports viewing numbers went up.

        Local sports talk radio (and then national equivalents through ESPN) gave fans a chance to feel like they had a voice in the team

        Satellite TV allowed all the games (not just local ones) to be viewable; extended by internet streaming like MLB.TV which can make every game from the season viewable.

 

Fantasy Sports

           While you can always get the thrill of playing sports by playing them, it took people to invent mathematical simulations in order to get the thrill of “managing” a team.

       The incredibly profitable niche of sports video games, dominated by Electronic Arts (the makers of FIFA and John Madden Football) recreates the immersive competition, without the physicality

      There are now international championships for all sports video games

           The Original Fantasy sport is probable a Strat-o-Matic Baseball (a board game where you set lineups, decide how to swing/pitch, throw dice and reference a probability table on baseball cards)

           Contemporary fantasy sports starts with Daniel Okrent’s Rotisserie Baseball (so named for the restaurant the first league met).   Now call it “Roto”

       Each team drafts a full roster of players, scores points in 5 offensive and 5 pitching categories based on actual player results

      So it is played right along  with the real season

       Before the internet (and really, Yahoo), it was incredibly time consuming (having to use paper and pencil, and then later Excel spreadsheets) to tabulate everything

      Thus the appeal was very limited

 

Fantasy Sports (cont.)

            Although fantasy baseball came first, it is fantasy football which is by far the most popular

        It is far, far easier to play and understand than roto baseball:

       Involves points, not categories (some of which are ratios)

       Roto baseball tended to score entire seasons; football was weekly head to head (so more immediate reward and excitement)

       Only 16 football games (at most) each week, not 90; only 16 weeks in fantasy season, not 25

       Fewer positions  (QB, RB, WR, TE, K, DEF)

       Thus there is a high luck factor (due both to scoring system and the dynamic nature of the NFL and its players’ short careers), means even weak fantasy players will perform well some years

 

Fantasy Sports (cont.)

            While most fantasy leagues among friends involve money, the big innovation is Daily Fantasy

        Instead of each player appearing in only one team per league; participants are given X number of dollars and can “buy” whatever players you want

       For football, your “team” was together for one week; in baseball and basket ball, one night – after which you could choose a new team

        People who do this professionally enter hundreds of contests a week for football; dozens a day for baseball and basketball

        Clearly this is much closer to gambling than season-long fantasy (since small sample size is less predictable), but it is legal in most states

       Many former online poker players moved in, since online poker is illegal.

            Fantasy and video games, by providing a more interactive experience, have vastly increased interest in the NFL

        Players can also be more interactive with fans through Twitter (although sometimes fans interact in negative ways).

        It has also changed fandom: if you go to a bar to watch games, people are often rooting for individual players as much as entire teams.

 

Positivism and Fandom

           Billings and Ruihely’s article is textbook positivism – a 1200 person survey, using categories of analysis that emerged from their survey or others surveys

       The survey compared the motivations of traditional sports fans and fantasy players

           They cited existing literature, which showed:

       Fantasy players tended to consume much more sports media than traditional fans; also tend to be better educated, more male and more upscale

      Although this is less so every year, possibly due to well-educated being early adopters

       Traditional sports fans are into the “escalated emotion” with the dramatic narrative arc

      They talk more before and after than any other type of fan

           They asked questions about motivation in areas drawn from other studies, including: (a) entertainment (b) eustress (c) self-esteem, (d) escape (e) appreciation of learning (f) appreciation of aesthetics (g) companionship (h) group affiliation (i) family (j) economic motivation and (k) surveillance/control

           Their study showed (using measure of statistically significant correlation)

       That for traditional sports fans escape was more important than for fantasy players

       That fantasy players enjoyed control of a team, self esteemed gained through bragging rights and achievement in front of friends, and had more fun.

           And although they would eschew the representational categories; non-representational theory would like us to notice that none of this fake; and much of it benign or even good.

 

 

Political Economy

            Fandom can be seen as both “ideology” in the Marxist sense (that love of sports blinds people to its exploitative capitalist nature) and the Zizek sense (we know very well owners/leagues are slimy rich guys, but yet…)

            Either way, it is very lucrative for the owners, who extract rent (for their exclusive control over the product) collectively from taxpayers and cable/satellite subscribers, plus those who willingly give them money for tickets and merchandise.

        Post-modern political economists (like Baudrillard) would argue that the key is that sports fandom becomes the center of a constellation of objects – that includes sports media, dining, drinking, game attendance, and merchandise.  All of which can become profit centers

        It certainly crowds out other possible uses for tax payer money.

 

Political Economy (cont.)

            Although major sports live spectatorship was once pursuable by the working class, (even if it was for ideological reasons) it has now been largely taken away

        Stadiums are filled with luxury box seating; ticket, parking and refreshment prices are out of reach for many

       The Superbowl in particular extracts huge outlays from the local government, all to throw a party for richest people in America

        This was the point of Hughson and Powell: in trying to get rid of a few genuine  criminals and racists that organized themselves along sports,  the English FA is attempting a class shift

       Much of the charm of English football is the singing in the stands and the mass of supporters – moving towards a luxury box model cheapens that

      Ideally, the way forward is to be more inclusive on many divisions (and not exclude class)

            However, some would note that thanks to  sports talk radio, internet and fantasy, fans have never had so much ability to challenge official scripts and make their own meaning around the games

 

 

Feminist Perspectives

          While we will cover sports participation later, various feminist perspectives have had a lot to say about sports fandom

     For along time women were either by social custom or law from attending live sports performed by men

      In Iran, this is still the case.

     This mattered because “small talk” among men, particularly in the world of work, tends to be dominated by sports

      Being part of small talk is a good way to advance in a social situation; being excluded from small talk means missed opportunity

 

Feminist Perspectives

           Even today, the “average” sports viewer is considered (at least by advertisers) to be male

       Thus the odd presence of female only dance team/cheerleaders at football/basketball teams

      As it turns out, this intersects with political economy, because teams have been economically exploiting these squads for years.

       Teams make really lame attempts to court female fans, where there is pink merchandise and men come “mansplain” to women about sports

           Many men view sports as their “refuge” from women  -- thus the whole “man cave” thing

       Some feminist theory identifies sports spectatorship/fantasy sports as a last bastion of “acceptable” misogyny and male aggressiveness that is used to purposefully exclude the women in their lives and provide a hiding place from increasingly shared household duties.

      It is also a favorite activity for men to engage with sons with, and thus reinforces gender stereotypes

    Although inclusion and engagement of daughters does go up every year

 

Feminist Perspectives (cont.)

       Women sports fans are much more likely than men to list “family time” or “strengthening relationship” as their reason for interest in sports

       Men are also far less likely to watch women’s sports than women are to watch men’s sports.

      A certain percentage of male sports fans are extremely dismissive of the bodies and athletic capabilities of female athletes, particular those who are GLBTQ.

      There a vicious cycle with the sports media, which do not cover women’s sports, which keeps many men uninterested, which keeps the media from covering women’s sports…

           To be clear: it is fine that different people (even people in a relationship) have different interests.   It is when those interests aggressively exclude (and sometimes belittle) other groups of people that they become pernicious

       For example, woodworking is hobby pursued disproportionately  by men, alone in workshops or tool sheds.   It somehow manages to be much less exclusionary than sports fandom.

           Also, to be clear: there are many, many female sports fans; that doesn’t change the large scale gendering that goes on.

 

Queer Perspectives

          While there will be more on participation later, it obvious that sports fandom is generally not only gendered for the male viewer, it is unabashedly heterosexual

     This is despite the fact – as some queer theorists have pointed out – that sports fandom involves a lot of men hugging/touching men, showing emotion in front of other men, trying to impress other men with what they are wearing or cooking

          And obviously, acceptance of GLBTQ athletes by certain segments of fans is extraordinarily low

     Fewer fans want to openly discriminate, but many want a “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy – which still renders different sexualities invisible

 

Post-Colonial/Minor Theories

           Race and sports talk media is a topic to be covered at a later date, but the grand narratives that tend to envelop sports matter a great deal in relations between groups (especially when they involve a reversal of power relations)

       In other countries, which team is rooted for can be as much a political decision as a territorial one

      In Glasgow, Scotland, there are two teams: Rangers and Celtic.  

    Rangers is historically the protestant team; Celtic the Catholic team
»    Rangers did not get its first Catholic player until the 1990’s

      Many countries have a team of the ruling elite (Real Madrid, Zamalek) and the people or the minority (Barcelona, Al Ahly)

       In the US, a team can still coalesce an us vs. them regional dynamic, becoming a focal point to defy large scale change

      The Cleveland Browns sell out every game, year after, despite never winning; people are intensely loyal

      Its not a great city; but many feel a need to defend it

 

Conclusions

            There weren’t always spectator sports and they weren’t everywhere

        Thus this thing we call fandom is probably created through institutions

            On the one hand…

        Sports owners (and even university alumni associations, like Ohio State, which charges $200 every year for the chance to purchase $80 football tickets) exploit and manipulate the desire for intense feeling into big financial gain

            On the other hand…

        Without fans, professional sports as we know it wouldn’t exist.  There are lots of sports without fans, and these sports have no money.

       New sports emerge with fans – the X-games sports are good examples

       Vocal fan bases can often get owners to make changes

        The feelings people feel are genuine and people are not just passive consumers

            On the other hand…

        Sports fandom, being a human activity, tends to fall prey to many of the same prejudices that befall other aspects of society

       The intensity of feeling around sports fandom perhaps heightens this all the more.