10 Sports Fandom

To begin, I thought I’d provide a link to the last unit of material and share a recent video that went viral. It demonstrates how the language of sport “is one of branding, sponsorship, event management, public relations, and television rights and, most crucially in the context of digital communications, social media activity” (Boyle and Haynes, 2014, p. 135). The following is a masterful example of sports-based public relations which, as could be expected, generated a lot of commentary (mostly about the nature of men’s vs. women’s soccer rather than French telecommunications).

Obviously, sport matters, both economically^[1] and culturally (and often politically).^[2] The global sports market generated over $500 billion in revenue in 2023^[3]. Interestingly, the list of the word’s most valuable sports teams^[4] and professional sports leagues by revenue^[5] do not correspond to the most popular teams on social media^[6]. Social media, e-commerce, and fan engagement initiatives by sports figures and franchises alike fuel the participatory culture around sports where even the sale of football (soccer) merchandise alone accounts for about $12 billion dollars a year^[7]. This does not include the burgeoning popularity of e-sports, the mix of video games and professional organizations fuelled by live streaming and the creator economy, with 2023 figures of 31.6 million esports viewers and $264.3 million of advertising revenue^[8]. Interestingly, one report further stratifies esports audiences into distinct categories of “occasional viewers” and “enthusiasts” to suggest an audience of over 532 million in 2022^[9]. And one must also acknowledge the further mediatization of fun and competition that is fantasy sports. One estimate suggested this industry was worth more than $7 billion annually (Kissane and Winslow, 2020, p. 5). Taking all of this (and more) into account, a ‘scouting report’ of five major industry trends in the sporting industry for investors suggested “in this global golden age of sports, 2023 is expected to bring organizations and athletes more chances than ever to deeply connect with their fans”, highlighting the blending of physical and digital experiences, the importance of sports betting, the rise (but precarity) of women’s sports, and the professionalization of college athletics^[10]. While this means the overall market is healthy and audience demand is similarly vital, what does this mean for the academic study of audiences situated in and understood as participatory culture?

First, we have to recognize that spectator sports are more than just spectacles of sport being performed by athletes for willing audiences. In today’s hyper-commercialized and hyper-mediated world, “sport producers (athletes, coaches, managers, owners, and administrators) co-create sporting events in conjunction with sport consumers (those attending the event)” (Andrews and Ritzer, 2018, p. 358). Sports spectators are prosumers, not just paying for the thrill of watching sports, but contributing to the sensation thereof. And this goes beyond physically forming the audience for a sporting event, many of which seemed strange without the assembled crowd present during the COVID crisis (see, for example, the bio-secure efforts of the WWE’s “Thunderdome”^[11] and the NBA bubble^[12]. 

In fact, there is an argument that the traditional logic of bringing the thrill of the live event home for fans has been reversed now so that the personalization and democratization of the audience experience at home needs to be brought to the live event so as to disrupt “a situation in which spectator sport is reduced to being a centrally conceived and controlled form of cultural nothingness: the sporting contest is manufactured as a non-event; the sport stadium is rendered a non-place and the spectator becomes a non-person displaying a lack of distinctive, unique, locally, and temporally specific human creativity” (Andrews and Ritzer, 2018, p. 360).

The prosumer aspect of sporting audience is even more pronounced in an interactive digital media environment where participatory culture defines the nature of audience interaction. Participatory culture upends top-down sporting systems premised upon provider-generated and relatively standardized, controlled content. Some have suggested that the relationship between sports fans and their objects of affection goes beyond parasocial attachments and into the realm of ‘metapersonal connection’ insofar as “sports fans are increasingly interested in electronically mediated personal engagement from their sources of sports entertainment, in addition to (or as opposed to) face-to-face personal engagement” (Dittmore et al., 2012, p. 185). That is to say, unlike celebrity or TV/film fandoms that are unlikely to ever have direct contact with their object of affection, sports fans’ digital engagement augments or replaces their real-world activity (with friends and family and at sporting events). “Fans want to feel special and appreciated by the athletes and teams that they follow, and they look upon new media as a vehicle for such interaction” (Dittmore et al., 2012, p. 185). Beyond seeing media and sport as inextricably intertwined, Web 2.0 technology has brought about a new era:

An era of SocialMediaSport in which sports fans actively seek and create meaningful connections with their favorite athletes, organizations, media, and each other through the co-production and dissemination of a larger sport narrative. In turn, these athletes, organizations and media groups have responded by reaching out to fans on an increasingly intimate and social level – engaging them not only as customers but as co-producers of their respective messages, brands and identities. (Bowman and Cranmer, 2014, pp. 213-214)

The implications of this are incredibly far-ranging. Audiences have a greater variety of options with which they can choose to spend their time and attention. And they have greater agency when it comes to how they engage. Sports teams, figures and franchises are all able to promote themselves more, building their brands by building better relationships with those audiences. Individual athletes are able to gain much more agency, developing social media followings and, in many cases, monetize that. The historic 2021 ruling by the National Collegiate Athletic Association that allowed college athletes to profit off of their name, image and likeness (NIL) represents a seismic shift in the SocialMediaSport landscape, for instance. Now, suddenly there is a new billion dollar industry built around student-athlete influencers^[13]. So what concepts can help us understand the dynamics of this SocialMediaSport era? What can we use to help define and categorize sports fans?

First let us distinguish the sports fan from the non-sports fan. This is important because sports is so ubiquitous in our culture that it is typically much more difficult to avoid sports (and their fans) compared to other programming.”Non-fans, as a broad category, are comprised of those who are unaware, aware but without formed consumption intentions, and aware but have rejected the idea of consuming sport (with varying intensity)” (McDonald et al., 2023, p. 4). They are non-consumers who avoid sport completely. This is partly explained by the affective connection of fans (and non fans) of sport:

We have to acknowledge that participatory culture built around sport includes a wide gamut of sporting behavior, including recreational content and competitive content that isn’t “normally” considered as spectatorial. Take competitive dance, for example. With every member of the audience potentially capturing the action from another angle, creating content to be stitched together with extra commentary, every highlight is a potential viral video (like the following):

Such a video is likely to help build dancers’ personal brands (the original video currently has over 4 million views in addition to countless copies) and build a fandom for the sport. Alternatively, there are people engaged in sporting activity with no actual audience except for one’s own self-recording; a random moment can become spreadable content, not designed to build a brand but simply to capture one’s attention because of its human-interest-element:

Take e-sports as another example of “non-traditional” sports. Understood as “an organized and competitive approach to playing computer games” (Andrews and Ritzer, 2018, p. 364), such “cyber-athletic competition cannot be thought of in terms of media or sport or computer gaming. The institutional and material boundaries separating them have imploded, leading to the creation of a new social form, e-sport’’ (Hutchins, 2008, p. 865). 

Not to mention fantasy sports! Fantasy sports is “a powerful sport industry and a dominant sport subculture creating and utilizing new sport media [with research that] discovered a near 60% increase in overall media consumption from those not participating in fantasy sport to those that do participate” (Ruihley and Hardin, 2014, p. 238). Fantasy sports, like sports betting, produces expert commentary designed to provide information about sports, in both  a production context and a produser context. Kissane and Winslow suggest that we can see a shift from “traditional fandom” to “fantasy sports fandom” wherein the former involves and rewards allegiance to a specific team or teams but the latter’s focus is on “single plays or series of plays … away from real teams to individual athletes” (2020, p. 23). Fantasy sports thus encourages the strategic discovery and deployment of intimate knowledge of the game. It depends upon the existence of “executive fans” — rooted in the idea of a social hierarchy of fans with some who are ‘executives’ of their fan clubs. 

“Fan social capital cannot be entirely divorced from fan cultural capital, since it is likely that fans with a very high fan cultural capital will become the ‘executive fans,’ and will therefore possess high level of fan social capital” (Hills 2002, p. 30). Executive fans seek “to create social meaning for themselves and others by representing themselves as the ‘true custodians’ of sport” (Hutchins, Rowe, and Ruddock, 2022, p. 365). Turned into a collective force, we see the concept of ‘executive fandom’, “a longstanding aspiration of many dedicated fans to participate actively in the running of teams and sports – to make their voices heard and to see their wishes acted upon” (Hutchins, Rowe, and Ruddock, 2022, p. 366).

While most can not substantively exercise control over the operation of a franchise and wrest ownership from the hands of ‘out of touch’ business executives, the fantasy operation allows keen audience members to become users of digital media, not just consumers, demonstrating their knowledge and building their reputation. We must not forget, though, that the simulacrum of control comes with attendant costs too: “Those who seek to assert fan power in sport should be acutely aware that, in the very act of doing so, they are producing the data that may be appropriated for very different, less liberating purposes” (Hutchins, Rowe, and Ruddock, 2022, p. 373). And beyond privacy concerns, there’s also the issue of gendered belief systems enacted in the data: Fantasy sports encourage a ‘jock statsculinity,’ a combination of hegemonic, masculine traits embodied as “one-upmanship, competition, athleticism, control, and aggression – with a more nerdy and boyish masculinity that involves escaping responsibilities and being strategic, tech savvy, rational, and adept with statistics” (Kissane and Winslow, 2020, p. 16).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, fantasy sports users tend to reproduce the demographics of the stereotypical North American sport fan (Ruihley and Hardin, 2014, p. 238). A January 2023 survey found 45 percent of male respondents had engaged with fantasy sports at some point in their lives, while this figure stood at 32 percent for females^[14]. Statistics on sports betting are even more dramatically skewed along gender lines: As of 2022, the number of men on sports betting apps still exceeded the number of women by 250%, but the growth rate of women customers was nearly double than that of men (63%)^[15]. Interestingly, one report suggested a link between the increasing popularity of women’s sporting events and the increased amount of betting on those same events:

Viewership for women’s sports has grown rapidly, with expectations that this year’s Women’s World Cup could have double the 1.12 billion viewers who watched the tournament in 2019. The Women’s National Basketball Association reports that national TV audiences for its 2023 season are up 67% over last year. Audience growth parallels an increase in betting. … In 2019, just over 300,000 legal bets were made on women’s soccer; in 2022, the number had reached 700,000. In basketball, the WNBA reports that the number of bets made grew 270% in 2022 over the 2021 season (Minter, 2023).

Yes, on the surface, this seems to connect with the observation that “women’s sports represent a unique opportunity for digital fandom due to their historical underrepresentation in sport media” (Kennedy, Gonzales and Pegoraro, 2022, p. 269). For sure, people will engage more with sports when they feel they have a personal (especially monetary) stake in the proceedings. However, the ‘pros’ involved with making gaming more explicitly linked to gambling come with a long list of ‘cons’ too, so I will simply say that this is something that might make an interesting essay, as an old prof of mine was once fond of saying (as a way, I think, of avoiding saying anything further but tacitly encouraging students to investigate it should they see fit…)^[16]. Of course, there’s also the issue of audience-publics online debating if something deserves to be called a legitimate sport or not (such as the current discourse over slap-fighting)^[17]. Warning – slightly salty language (and outright violence) contained in the following:

References