I have been a big sports fan all my life, but I feel myself withdrawing HARD from pro sports this year.
Main culprits for me:
- The gross enshitification of being a sports fan.
Ticket and concession prices are though the roof. It requires multiple subscriptions to follow your team.
Worst one is fan merchandise which has completely turned to shit. When Fanatics bought the rights to every leagues jerseys, the quality completely fell off. I used to be able to buy a stitched premium jersey for $150. Now they want you to spend close to $300 and everything is screen printed. I have not bought a new jersey in 5 years.
- Advertising on everything.
It used to be that you would put up with what I considered a fair amount of advertising. 5 min commercial breaks after like 20-30 mins of gameplay.
Today though the commercial breaks are not good enough for these leagues. Now they are on the screen always. Patches on jerseys and helmets. Digitally inserted on the field/court.
Worst offenders are the NHL who now have their boards on the rink covered in digitally inserted advertising on their broadcasts. It would be one thing if they just changed ads every once in a while, but they make those things dance around and are insanely distracting. I consider the NHL basically unwatchable because of those stupid fake boards. It is funny to me when they show highlights and you see the real boards with simple advertising and I basically long for those again.
I also used to be a fan of NFL Redzone for alot of years. Not anymore though and if you have watched it lately then you understand why. They always billed themselves as “7 hours of commercial free sports,” but over the years they started to really test what that meant. They didn’t take proper commercial breaks, but suddenly sponsored segments were everywhere on the screen and they would pop up these ads on the edge of the screen and reduce the broadcast to a small box. This season they are showing full commercials now and are not even pretentending to be commercial free anymore. What I found most interesting about this situation though was the fans who basically ridiculed other fans for complaining about the commercials by saying that they should not have expected it to last forever. Which shows how conditioned fans are to expect rampant advertising in sports.
- The time suck
So many sports games takes 3-4 hours to play. If you are going to follow all your teams games, then that is 100’s of hours a season spent watching other people play a game. If you follow multiple teams then we are probably easily encroaching on thousands of hours. We have not even included the hours people spend watching analysis or “hot takes”
If I feel I have to catch up on a game, I can go on YouTube and watch a highlight of the game. The amount of times a 5 hour baseball game has a highlight video the lasts 5 mins really speaks volumes to me.
- Gambling
Probably the biggest factor that has eroded sports. It started with fantasy football forever ago, but now we see people literally throwing their lives away for parlays. Then seeing pregame shows where they are talking about the over/under of the game.
Sports leagues used to fight gambling to preserve their leagues integrity. Now they support gambling hard, but act shocked and dismayed when their players get corrupted.
- Pro sports don’t involve you
More of a personal realization than anything, as much as you can dedicate yourself to a team and be a diehard fan, these teams don’t care about you and never will. They are happy to sell you things stamped with their logo and claim that they will always chase championships, but ultimately they care about profit and themselves. They don’t act in the best interest of fans no matter how much they try to convince you otherwise.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for me and I could list examples all day. I think ultimately I am realizing that I need to reevaluate my relationship with sports and not make it such a priority in my life.
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I want you to do a little thought experiment with me…
Sports make a shit ton of money. They have advertisements crammed anywhere they can. When you go to a stadium, the shots of crowds are almost always pre-recorded, or actors, so they can package the emotions they want to convey without risking a genuine moment from genuine fans not going exactly how they want it to.
They gouge you with ticket prices, they gouge you with food/drink prices, the gouge you for parking. If you’re watching at home, you have to subscribe to their specific streaming platform, and even then it doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to see the game they want.
They recruit kids in high school and college and use them knowing full well that less than 1% will have anything resembling success. They spend millions upon millions exploiting these kids.
They give quasi-legal performance enhancing drugs to their athletes. Ones that are labeled as supplements and aren’t technically against the rules, but do the exact same thing.
They hide studies that say their sport causes long-term injuries. They bribe local officials to get huge tax breaks on building new stadiums. They have teams of lawyers and PR personnel to cover up all but the most extreme controversies from their players. They have people working night and day to find new ways to keep people’s attention and have them consume more. They found a way to make gambling legal again and have been pushing HARD for it.
Now I want you to look at all these underhanded and slimy tactics they use, and really ask yourself: “Are the games themselves rigged?”. If your immediate answer is “No, of course not! They would never mess with the integrity of the game itself!” why do you feel that way? Why do you trust organizations, that have shown they hold nothing sacred if it means more money, to NOT mess with the game itself? You know they would if they could get away with it; and with the state of the world today, do you really think they COULDN’T get away with it?
Same way I’ve always felt about professional sports. Do what you want, have fun, but you’re taking a game way too seriously.
You hit the nail on the head. The enshittification is real.
I’m a diehard Astros fan. Game tickets are still pretty affordable but everything else is expensive af. When I was living in Austin where Astros games weren’t really syndicated on TV, I still couldn’t watch them even if I subscribed to MLB.TV because I was in their blackout area. They make it a pain in the ass to even watch games and then they wonder why MLB attendance is down.
I’m still a big fan of all my teams but I really only casually follow sports at this time. You can still be a sports fan while not taking it super seriously.
I followed futbol 𖦹°ᯓ⚽ ( european leagues and international tounaments mostly), for close to 15 years. (Mid 2000’s till the pandemic)
The biggest ones for me were:
Time sink.- Games are long, I get restless now. Also, too many hours a week spent watching tv.
Keeping track of too much info- It stopped being fun when I had no one esle to discuss it with in a casual way.
I’ve always pirated futbol so ease of access was never an issue for me, but looking for sources is also kind of a chore.
Social media.- there’s always been big scandals in sports, but now we get to know too much about the players / others themselves: this guy is a racist, this one a wife beater, or a rapist, etc. (and look, no consequences!). It was easier back then to just focus on the games. I find it hard to enjoy a match when I know the quality some of the people involved.
There’s also the corruption, the lack of ethics (like Qatar building the world cup infrastructure with slave labor)… Sigh
When the world cup was on, I used to sit through all the games I could, even had them on the background while at work. Now, I’m not really excited for next one, even though it’s the last thing that I still followed.
I might watch some games, but I don’t feel passionate about the sport any more.
I quit watching all sports, cold turkey, four years ago and haven’t looked back. I feel so much better now and have more free time.
I used to watch as much sport as I could find. Now I can’t find any unless I revert to paid, or questionable, streaming sites.
I started as a foundation member of my local A-League club and remained for over 12 years, my seat never changed, but they would classify my seat differently from silver to gold to platinum, this substantially increased the cost, now it’s not affordable.
I get far more enjoyment watching the 1st team of my son’s soccer club – it’s cheaper and I’m happy to volunteer my time around the club.
I feel like following a specific sports team feels like a full time job now. You can’t just watch the games live, you have to follow all the players on social media, watch for trade rumors, following the pre and post seasons, know all players names and play fantasy sports. I used to like to casually watch most of the local teams play but the expectations around being a fan is too high. Since I am male it is assumed that this is my whole life and hobby when really I don’t care that much. Now, I only want to watch a game with my friends as an excuse to hang out. It feels not worth the effort because there is too much content and you need to consume it all to engage with it. Makes me want to opt out
I used to be into it more in high school and college. My hometown teams were winning and it was a great bonding experience with other guys and my dad.
After I had kids and was working full time, I didn’t have time. Not to mention I was an early cord cutter, so I couldn’t follow games like I used to when I had cable. Another factor was that the research on CTE made watching American football feel gross.
I came to realize, I didn’t really miss it all that much. I will watch an occasional game here or there if it’s special, but otherwise meh. There’s plenty of other things I either have to do or would prefer doing instead. Maintaining a home and kids’ activities take a lot of time. When I do have free time I’d rather play a game or watch a good show. I will keep up with the headlines just so I can have a conversation with my dad or father in law about whatever is happening, but it’s pretty minimal at this point.
It all went wrong when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016. The Curse was there for a reason and breaking it shifted us into an unstable configuration of possibility space. More and more unlikely and incomprehensible things will keep happening unless the timeline is corrected. I’m not saying we need to rewrite history… but I’m not saying it’s not worth a try, either.
I’ve tried to get into watching sports a number of times before. I do enjoy the athleticism and strategy needed to play and win, but I think you picked out the bug bears I also had fairly well.
I’ve found playing sports much more rewarding than watching them.
Sportsball.
So much wasted money and effort.
Play your games but stop acting like they’re the most important things on the planet.
Before every game: A SHOWDOWN FOR THE AGES, TWO TEAMS ENTER, WHO WILL WIN, WITNESS HISTORY AS THESE TWO LEGENDARY TEAMS BATTLE IT OUT IN THE GAME OF THE CENTURY
Would it be weird to say that I don’t feel anything about it at all?
We’ve already see baseball start to respond to some of the problems you listed, but I see it continuing to be a major issue for most leagues as the teams have got caught up in the asset appreciation seen in other kinds of assets.
I enjoy watching sports, but I do not obsess over it. I have a MythTV DVR setup to record OTA broadcasts. It records some matches, I watch those matches. I skip all the commercials and a lot of the boring bits TBH. Sometimes I go watch highlights on Youtube of my favorite teams.
I have my favorite teams and sometimes I liken sports as a form of escapism. But, I do not ever religiously watch sports shows, listen to a lot of sports networks and actively follow anything closely. I am only there when the World Series, NBA Finals and the Super Bowl happens.
Can’t say I’ve ever attended a game, paid a ticket, bought any merch and whatnot. All of that just sound like money sinks to me. I am as minimal effort as they come when it comes to sports.
I think quite frankly, that athletes are simply overpaid. I always often wonder as to how much of their salaried contracts could go to better things than just dumping multi-millions into a few year long contract. And trust me, I get it, it’s a lot of hard work for an athlete to be in shape, remain in shape and deal with the grueling travel and schedules of some leagues. But, still, we’re talking millions to people who’re all set for life, regardless unless they turn out to be trainwrecks of human beings.
