As a long time fan of a soccer club that endured a decade of humiliation followed by success, the reason is that you can't tell the real fans from the fairweather fans during the good times.
So the bonding stories are often the ones where we reminisce about bad times and about players who were marginal in the league but memorable to us. Also the judas story works nicely too, that's always some guy who has to make a living and he ends up joining the rivals.
If you're going to find out who really loves the club, because you know tribalism, you can't talk about the time you won the treble. You have to talk about that time you schlepped your friends across the country only to see them get reversed 3-2. Or when someone does yet another shitpost asking for the all time XI, you pull out that obscure defender they got on loan who was terrible and played only 5 games. Or that time you did a pitch invasion thanks to a cult player scoring an equaliser in an otherwise bad game that people were already leaving.
I can admire someone that is really at the top of their craft in just about any field. It is something to watch and be inspired and amazed by.
I never understand the concept of cheering for a team that sucks because of some loyalty. Loyalty to what exactly? The players come and go over the years, perhaps it's a loyalty to the owners? or as Seinfeld used to call it, "cheering for laundry".
You do it to exercise and to excise your tribal instincts. What's special about a tribe? You can't leave it. Someone quipped that you can leave your wife and you can leave your job, you can't leave your club.
In truth if you've ever had a friend who changed clubs after the age of 10 they've been ridiculed for decades since.
Why do I follow a team, the same team? Because that tribal instict, it is against programming to change. Once you have picked you are Mormom-married (apparently the Mormons stay married in the afterlife?). A friend dragged me in. There are people who are buried with the banner of their club, and the family considers it an honour to have representatives present at the funeral.
I watch plenty of games by other clubs, I just don't care in the same way. Ronaldo or Messi would never play for my team, but I appreciate them in a sort of intellectual, emotionally distant way. Like how I watch NFL games, it's an interesting sport with strategically appealing elements. Do I really care whether Mahomes or Brady takes it? Nah.
>Loyalty to what exactly? The players come and go over the years, perhaps it's a loyalty to the owners?
Personnel is transient. That's why it makes sense to have loyalty to the identity of a team. That also elevates it from shilling a corporate entity to a lifestyle. Clubs often have relations and connections to their fanclubs, because they know they have a huge stake in the team and do hold some power. Also its more fun to watch sports if you have some skin in the game, instead of just observing 'neutrally', besides the social aspect. It's a kind of adhoc storytelling.
Locality and the pride of the local team. Do you cheer for your country's Olympic team? Do you stand for the pledge of allegience or national anthem? Why? Because that's what you were trained to do as a kid? Lots of sports fans start the same way.
If you are referring to betting on sports as "skin in the game" when making it more interesting just is an excuse for your need to bet on something. I never bet on sports of any type, and enjoy it just fine. If you feel that sports on only interesting if you have money on the line, then maybe it is time to seek help.
> Locality and the pride of the local team. Do you cheer for your country's Olympic team?
The big difference is that members of the Olympic team are citizens of the country, so the connection to you is clear (one of your "own" is doing well), while that's not the case for local teams. Often, they're not even from the same country (ex. lot of players for Canadian NHL teams are from the US, and vice versa).
So the only local part is the shell itself. Sounds vaguely related to "Ship of Theseus" I suppose.
If you're watching pro sports, you're watching those who are at the top of their craft win or lose. Occasionally there are some epically bad teams, but those are outliers. The margin of victory in most pro sports is very small, where the losing team might make 1 less great play than the winning team.
So cheering for a team that hasn't won big in a long time doesn't necessarily mean watching bad play. They might just perpetually be short that one player or coach. And, as someone whose team is usually bad, when they do win it's so sweet.
What's the point of cheering for the winner? You didn't help, the winner can't hear you cheering, and you didn't even predict anything. It's totally pointless. On top of that it's exhausting to keep guessing when to change your allegience. Do you switch who to cheer for every time the lead changes in a game or a season?
Sure, it's cool to watch the championships, but that's being a fan of the sport, not the team.
Same. My brother has loved the Huston Rockets for 10 years. They have been okay to good a few times since he's been a fan.
I've enjoyed watching OKC, the Lakers, Raptors, and the Bucks during that time. I chock it up to him enjoying the sport a lot more than I do. I don't want to watch a team lose.
Most years they lost in the first round of the playoffs or in the Conference Semifinals. They have been above average for sure but have a history of rallying around one player, Harden, TMac, Ming, and then crumbling for years once they leave/retire.
Following any team is like that. Sadness is what binds the fans together. Luckily, only one team needs to win each trophy each year, and some years one team wins several.
In 2017, my hometown Atlanta Falcons (an American football team) blew a 28-3 lead in Super Bowl 51. It was the most stunning high-profile choke in the history of the National Football League.
In the past few years since, the team has continued to develop a reputation for choking. We have lost a number of high-profile games, where the predictive models suggested a 99% probability of winning near the end. Yet we still found a way to lose at the last second.
During this time, I have observed that fanbase has become absolutely toxic. To the point where I don't even enjoy talking with other Falcons fans anymore, and find that many Falcons fans tend to feel the same way. Our fandom is an isolating, silent shame wrapped in a blanket of bitter denial and deflection.
The fanbases of other NFL teams, such as the Cleveland Browns or Buffalo Bills, are known for being charming and loveable for their loyalty in the face of decades of futility. But this has not been the outcome for our fanbase, in the face of sudden and abrupt disaster.
This is just one counter-anecdote. But I wonder if there are "kinds" or "degrees" of losing, whose nuance matters? Or kinds and degrees of fan culture, prior to the bonding loss?
Or maybe the whole thing is just nonsense. I know there are studies linked here, but cultural anthropology is borderline-pseudoscience.
I'm a long-time Eagles fan. The Eagles didn't have any failures as high profile as Super Bowl 51, but they did seriously contend for a long time without ever winning. At the time, it seemed like it was okay, because it meant at least most seasons meant something, but by the time Super Bowl 52 rolled around it almost felt like a mental illness that was magically cured by them winning.
I think the experience of being a fan of true sad-sack franchises doesn't have the same effect. (Probably Bills fans were like that after their fourth Super Bowl loss.) A successful season for the Browns or the Lions is 8-8, so they never reach the point where they think "This is our year." You got to think this was your year to the latest possible moment.
A similarly painful Super Bowl loss (Seahawks 2015) lead to me bonding with a large number of sports fans, within and without the Seahawks fan base.
I was in New Orleans for a professional conference and watched the game in the hotel bar. After that heart rending loss, I just wandered around Bourbon Street (still wearing my jersey) until the wee hours of the morning. I was greeted, chatted up, hugged, by fans of any number of teams, not even my own.
The "Fuck Tom Brady" factor may have played into this, which ties into the 'kinds' or 'degrees' of loss that you're leading in to. And yes, I certainly think there are degrees of losing.
>> We have lost a number of high-profile games, where the predictive models suggested a 99% probability of winning near the end.
If it's any consolation, I don't believe the Falcons were ever truly at 99%+ win probability, in the Super Bowl or in those blown leads this regular season. Most WP models, in my opinion, highly over/understate the true WP as they approach the extremes. Obviously ATL had a very high P(winning), but perhaps it was 96-97% rather than 99+. Seems like a minor difference, but from the NE side, if the Patriots truly had a 3.5% chance instead of a reported 0.5%, that's a 7x improvement. I've done some analysis on these models and written about it here: https://cfnine.com/blog/nfl-win-probability-part-1
I don't know where it originated, but my family uses the phrase "Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" for things like that Super Bowl game.
After that game, I noticed the Falcons fans in my town actually seemed more into the team (central GA at the time). Some people put away their apparel, but the ones who kept it up were more invested than ever.
Nice find, thanks. I knew it wasn't original to us, but I've rarely heard it outside of my home (though I also don't watch sports news/discussions so it's probably pretty common there).
As an MLB fan, I felt like it got even worse/less clear because it was about sports. I thought this had something to do with Barry Bonds. Reread that about 5 times.
It was originally capitalized: "Losing Bonds Sports Fans" before the title was edited. I will add that in the capitalized form, I also had a really hard time parsing the statement.
I wonder if the causality might run the other way — like, if you imagine a set of "all possible commitment levels of sports fans" you'd have hardcore committed... moderately committed... middle of the road... somewhat fairweather... complete bandwagonner.
Something like that, eh?
Losing might strip away the fairweather/bandwagoner fans, leaving only the people with a natural predilection to commitment. Winning might attract more bandwagon/fairweather fans.
You could probably test this by finding multiple teams that had around a 50% win percentage and finding fans that adopt them in early adulthood, like someone who goes to college in Indiana starting to root for the Indiana Pacers (basketball), etc.
If you build a sample of around 1000 people that adopted different middle-of-the-road teams, then followed them longitudinally, you could see whether they increase in commitment, drop out, or stay about the same with rising and falling fortunes of the team.
A lot of work, though. No doubt certain experiences shape perception of fandom, but I imagine it's different populations — not just the same type of starting population being effected by different events.
It’s a funny title. Both bonds and sports can be the verb. I’m assuming most people read the verb as Sports vs Bonds:
- Why Losing _Bonds_ Sports Fans: why when your team loses you strengthen your affiliations to your team.
- Why Losing Bonds _Sports_ Fans: why throwing away good money on bonds is popular (I have no background to decide why bond investing in bonds might be a good or bad idea).
Ugh I read it so many times because of this. First read: bonds? Like banking bonds? Second time: oh, Barry bonds from the giants? I didn’t like him either. Third read: ohhh bonds as in brings them together.
“Losing brings sports fans together” ok that makes sense.
Reading through the actual study, there were 752 fans surveyed, but 290 were fans of one team, and 27 were for teams other than the 10 teams they were focusing on, so really the analysis was a survey of 435 people. Also, the measure of affinity was answering a hypothetical question (a version of the Trolley Dilemma, except the person being asked would have to sacrifice himself/herself). So I'm a bit skeptical it's as simple as the study makes it out to be.
Anecdotally, it seems like it should be more complicated too. As a New York Yankees fan who was in Massachusetts when the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series (Major League Baseball) in 80+ years, it seems winning was a pretty big bonding moment for Red Sox fans.
I think affinity must also be different depending on the region. If you go to Boston, there are signs everywhere for the Red Sox and Patriots. In Seattle, everything is all about the Seahawks. In the New York area, we have multiple teams in the major pro sports, so sport-team-affinity and location-affinity are necessarily more loosely coupled here.
If that theory is true the most bonded sports fans in the world have to be those following the Detroit Lions. Why the Lions? The last championship the team won was in 1957, that's ten years before the first SuperBowl.
Most of the records the team holds involved losing, like being the only NFL team to go 0-16. It's an extremely rare occurrence when the team makes the playoffs, the team has only won a single playoff game in its history and they promptly fired the coach.
The team hires General Managers who have zero management experience and they're going to keep doing it until they win. The Detroit Lions just traded the best quarterback the franchise has had since 1957 in his prime to begin yet another rebuild, such pure joy.
The Lions have one thing going for them. They always play on Thanksgiving. And we usually get to see my dad get grumpy when his team loses on Thanskgiving ;)
They get to do that because they invented the entire idea of the Thanksgiving game. It is also one of the few times they ever see their games nationally. I remember twenty years ago they were on Monday Night football for the first and I think only time. In Michigan it was a huge deal, the entire state was talking about something other teams take for granted.
Ford ownership is the only variable that has remained the same. Did you know the date William Clay Ford bought the team? Pretty easy to remember, Nov 22, 1963. Talk about a jinx!
Not a great experiment to say the least, especially in English football where the socio-economic bond between fans in cities is stronger based on region and class structure. I was hoping the research they did would include some of this data, but it was completely missing from the research and the article.
To me the class structure as it relates to English football clubs is far more important and deeper than than just the simple "identity fusion" and "dysphoric
events" the article puts forth as the key bonding elements of football fans and their clubs
This reminds of my favorite article by sportswriter Bill Simmons, titled The Consequences of Caring, in which he describes seeing his daughter embrace a sports team and experience crushing disappointment for the first time, and reflects on his own lifetime of fandom.
The less successful teams in the English Premier League tend to not have many "plastic fans". Chances are if you support Sheffield United it's not because they went on a US/Asia summer tour, but rather because people in your immediate social environment (e.g. family and close friends) support them.
My career since 2006 has centered around fandom and identifying exciting games in real-time.
I'm a devout believer that sports fandom is all about wagering emotion. The more of your heart and happiness you "bet", the larger the payout when your team finally succeeds.
Interesting. As an Arsenal fan, we haven't hit our heady heights of the early 2000s ever again. Chelsea have been better than us, live in the same city, and are oil-powered and they still are tighter fused than Gooners. How strange. I wonder why that is.
An above average but not legendary yet beloved manager sat on the throne for much too long. Consistent top 4 and a Champion's League place is not something to be ignored nor laughed at, but not the same as what Fergie achieved in his long tenure.
Consistent top 4 and a Champion's League place with a shoestring budget while City and Chelsea were spending like crazy is nothing to laugh at. You're ignoring the context and diminishing his achievement. Just look what happened to Arsenal after he left. He definitely is a legend, albeit not Fergie. But then who can come close Fergie.
So the bonding stories are often the ones where we reminisce about bad times and about players who were marginal in the league but memorable to us. Also the judas story works nicely too, that's always some guy who has to make a living and he ends up joining the rivals.
If you're going to find out who really loves the club, because you know tribalism, you can't talk about the time you won the treble. You have to talk about that time you schlepped your friends across the country only to see them get reversed 3-2. Or when someone does yet another shitpost asking for the all time XI, you pull out that obscure defender they got on loan who was terrible and played only 5 games. Or that time you did a pitch invasion thanks to a cult player scoring an equaliser in an otherwise bad game that people were already leaving.