Sports Fandom, Another Failing Religion

When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” in 1882, he was voicing his concern that the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution had eliminated the possibility for religion, as we could now no longer trust its faith-based claims. Nietzsche saw all too clearly that the elimination of religion from the public realm would lead to disaster and chaos on an unprecedented scale. As the innate desire to worship would need to be replaced by something, it found it a new outlet in the rapidly growing alternative of nationalism — and created the conditions that launched the First World War.

In a similar vein, our relationship to sports, both as spectators and participants, can in many ways be thought of as religious in nature. Have you ever stopped to consider the exact reasons why you support the sports team you cheer for? Have you ever wandered through a crowd of a dedicated sports fans and thought to yourself, what is making them scream and shout this way for one particular team? People provide all kinds of reasons, which, on the surface, seem fair enough: their parents were supporters of that team; they like a particular player on that team; they simply like the team’s culture; or, most commonly, that it’s their hometown team. However, when you consider these general, vague responses with a little more thought, you will come to realize just how unexamined most team allegiances are in this era, and that it no longer makes much sense to so obstinately support one team over another, even if it is your hometown team. In much the same way that Nietzsche blamed the advances in science and philosophy for the death of religion, I claim that, due to the much more recent advances in technologies such as statistical analysis and financial instruments, as well as the rapid globalization taking place, sports fandom is dying too. There is no longer any reason to get overly excited or overly depressed about a team’s success or failure — unless, maybe, you have placed bets.

For the next few paragraphs I will be elucidating why it no longer makes any sense to support one particular sports team to the exclusion of others, and why there is no longer any such thing as a “home team”.

All in all, there are three main reasons, with the first, and simplest, being that the key actors of most sports teams, are no longer from the city or township where the team is based — that is, most of the time the players, the coaches, the managers and even the owners, come from different cities and even different countries. The second reason is that since the advent of Moneyball, there is very little in the way of a unique culture for a team, as so much is now decided based on raw statistics and data analysis. The third, and final, reason is that the sports teams have become commodified to a point where they no longer represent a sacred communal activity, so much as another consumer product.

Since the time that commercial air travel took off and became affordable and available to the many, sports teams were no longer restricted to recruiting players from the immediate vicinities. Recruiters could visit distant teams and sports clubs and scout new talent from these faraway places when the hometown options were limited or simply not good enough. At some point along the way, however, these “local” teams started including more and more players from outside of the host town. This holds true for the biggest teams and biggest sports leagues throughout the world. Starting with soccer (or football), take for example Manchester United FC, one of the biggest and most well-known teams in the world; as of December 2020 only twelve out of the thirty-one players on their roster right now are actually from England, and of that twelve only three are from the city of Manchester (Marcus Rashford, Brandon Williams, and Teden Mengi). Another one of my favorite examples are the winners of the 2019 NBA championships, the Toronto Raptors. Of the sixteen players on their roster, not a single one is from Toronto, or even from Canada. Looking at the New York Yankees baseball team, of the forty players on their roster, only two are from the State of New York (Mike King and Adam Ottavino), and only one from New York City (Adam Ottavino). Though a real stretch, one could still potentially argue that the teams’ owners or coaches are from the city where the team is based, and that this is what connects the fans to the team. But looking at the aforementioned examples, we would see that even the owners and managers of these teams are not from these cities or countries. Manchester United, for example, is owned by the Glazer family, a prominent business family from Rochester, New York; and their head coach is Ole Gunnar Solksjaer, a former player from Norway. In the case of the New York Yankees, they are owned by the Steinbrenner family, another prominent American business family out of Culver, Indiana — not New York. In all fairness the Toronto Raptors are owned by MLSE, a Canadian commercial real estate company, their current head coach, Nick Nurse, is a former college player from Carrol, Iowa. In the end, it appears that the only thing connecting a particular team to the city it claims to be from, and represent, may very well be the stadium — as it is literally attached to the city.

The second reason why it no longer makes sense to support one single sports team is that Moneyball has, for the most part, removed any unique team culture and unique styles of play that may have once existed within different teams. The concept of Moneyball is commonly attributed to the 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, where the manager Billy Beane took an approach to team assembly that was much more heavily reliant on new statistics and hard data analysis instead of the knowledge and outdated measures that were being used by traditionalists and baseball insiders (Lewis, 2003). This analytical approach to fielding players has since been adopted across many different sports, and is rapidly becoming the standard throughout all sports leagues. It is used by many different teams such as Arsenal and Liverpool FC of the English Premier League, by the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and the Tampa Bay Rays of the MLB; and perhaps most notably by the Houston Rockets of the NBA when they hired Daryl Morey, a computer scientist by trade, as their general manager (Lewis, 2017).

Essentially, with Moneyball, a team’s success is no longer dependent on factors such as the city it is from, the hometown talent, and the traditional knowledge that had been accumulated by the sport experts from that city. Whereas before the best teams were normally based in the largest metropolises, as that was where the most money was and where the largest pools of talent to draw from; with the advent of Moneyball, this no longer applies and any team in any city could employ the same analytical methods and optimize their team. The competition then becomes less so about the skills of the players and coaches on the team, and more about the managers’ negotiating skills for acquiring the most sought-after players. The entire practice is reduced to numbers, ratings, and P&L charts, and leaves little room for tradition and consideration of the actual players, people, and locales involved.

The third and final reason it no longer makes any sense to be a die-hard fan of one single sports team to the exclusion of others, is that the teams have become too commodified, more closely resembling consumer products than primordial bastions of tradition. It would seem that team sports and sport fandom have mutated from a lively, grassroots manifestation of primal human impulses into a soulless charade. When the first national soccer league in the world, the FA (Football Association), was formed in England back in 1863, it saw the formalization of teams that had developed organically out of public schools and factories, where students and workers who had continued to play variations of soccer (like Gaelic football, rugby, and something called socker) began institutionalizing into the teams we know today (Morris, 2016). Manchester United, for example, started out in 1878 as Newton Heath LYR FC, the roster consisted of railway workers from the carriage and wagon departments of the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway — and today it is one of the most commercialized sports teams in the world (Velayutham & Velayutham, 2016).

The renowned Oxford zoologist, Desmond Morris, explains in his book, The Soccer Tribe, that all team sports serve to recreate the conditions for a hunt. After hominids had spent more than one million years hunting and gathering, the swift transition to agriculture only ten thousand years ago suddenly removed the need to hunt — but did not remove the now-innate stimulation felt from devising tactics, taking extreme risks, and the climax of the kill (Morris, 2016). It stands to reason that these hunts would have traditionally been done by the same members of a tribe for many years, which involved an element of consistency and, consequently, of trust as well. Hunters and tribe members were not being brought over on one-year loans from neighbouring tribes or being traded after two hunting seasons. With the first sports teams, what created the strong, tribe-like bonds between fans and teams was indeed the same type of consistency. Every season you knew you were going to see more or less the same players on the pitch (or whatever other playing ground), and what’s more, the players were all members of the local communities — usually workers and students as mentioned before. In these times, it was quite uncommon to have workers or players leave their cities, as the opportunity to travel was not as widely available as it is today, and the same financial incentives did not exist for workers and sportsmen to move away and play for other teams.

In recent times, however, players are seemingly traded from team to team every year, and new players are constantly being recruited from all over. This lack of consistency brings to mind the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Believed to have originated with Plato, the thought experiment asks us to imagine the ship sailed by the hero, Theseus, as a sort of museum piece whose parts begin to rot and have to be replaced at different times, and when all of the parts have been replaced and none of the original parts remain, asks whether this ship is the same as the original. All of this to say that as players and managers constantly change, it shows that there is nothing really perennial or sacred at all about any particular team. Some teams may be older and have stronger traditions than others, such as Liverpool FC (founded in 1892) and other teams may have only recently come into existence, such as Paris Saint-Germain (founded in 1970), but this does not change their current state with respect to what the teams consist of today, their priorities, and their relationship to the fans.

In the end, it is important to clarify that this is not a polemic against team sports as a whole, whether you are a spectator or participant. This is all merely a suggestion that the structure and guiding principles of professional, spectator team sports have changed so much since the days of their inception that there is no longer any reasonable foundation for cultural, or emotional, attachment to any one team. There is no longer any reason for people to get so worked up over the win or loss of any one particular sports team. This being said, it is also important to point out that team sports are still an undoubtedly essential source of social and political capital, as they remain one of the primary, and most effective, builders of camaraderie among humans where it may not otherwise exist in today’s societies. As Robert Putnam expressed in his work, Bowling Alone (2000), the social interactions and discussions that come about in league sport environments, and the consequent social capital they create, are fundamental components of functional democracy, as they promote civic engagement.

This devolution of team sports is not a good thing, much the same way that the death of god did not represent a good thing for Nietzsche over one-hundred years ago. Without god and religion people became lost, and eventually found a new religion in the nationalism that led to the First World War, and caused unprecedented chaos and destruction. In the same way, with team sports continuing to lose their potential to be taken seriously, we risk losing a huge source of social capital. When the observations that have been laid out here start becoming apparent to more and more people, and they lose their faith in team sports, I worry what it will come to be replaced by.