Why would anyone support an American sports team?
It is baffling why so many American sports fans support and display loyalty towards their country’s professional teams. The structure and system of most professional sports in the United States are farcical and so blatantly contrived that it seems bizarre that any person with an ounce of sanity, integrity, or discernment would buy into the charade.
Firstly, the leagues themselves, such as the NBA, NFL, NHL, or MLB, are not so much sporting organizations as business corporations, all of which have created monopolies for themselves in their discrete sports. The league decides who can play, where they play, and when. There is no link to any lower leagues or a wider framework of the sport that would allow teams to be promoted and demoted or to control their destiny based on results. Thus, each league acts as a cartel whereby the same teams play each other repeatedly, season-in season-out, regardless of results. Here, the “post-season” is the only possibility for any semblance of uncertainty or variation, yet even this remains nothing more than a competition between other teams in the plunderbund.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly in terms of fandom, the teams are simply franchises with no roots, history, or organic attachment to the city or region in which they play. They are not clubs in any meaningful sense of the word but manufactured products, polished and branded, replete with silly names, logos, and sparkly new uniforms. The teams are then installed in cities solely on the basis of how much profit the league thinks it can extract from the franchise and, by extension, the local population. This unabashed artifice is exemplified by the moving of franchises from region to region when they are not proving profitable enough. The Brooklyn Dodgers migrated over three thousand miles and became the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Oakland Raiders become the LA Raiders and then the Las Vegas Raiders. Did the Raiders fans in Oakland continue to support them when they became the LA Raiders? Did the Raiders fans in LA continue to support them when they moved to Las Vegas? To sports fans from many other cultures and countries — where professional sports teams are founded and developed in one place, often the product of generations, and with the community’s DNA embedded within the team — such a masquerade and cynical approach to sport is a perversion.
An interesting comparison would be football (soccer) teams in the English Premier League. Of course, some of these clubs are immensely wealthy and are also very much run as businesses, but every team in that league has earned its right to be there through their own achievements, not by decree. More importantly, each club has been formed (many over a century ago) by local groups and local people, whether the founders were simply neighbors, work colleagues, fellow members of a civic organization, or trade unions. Every club invariably began as a small community-based team playing on local fields in front of no-one and they evolved over the years into the teams they are today. And each of these clubs continues to represent a community, a history, a culture, a tradition, and a way of life, defined by its location, foundation, and evolution.
Crucially, although in a vastly changed financial and cultural landscape, this access and openness exists even today. For example, if tomorrow I wanted to get a group of friends together to form a football team in England, then there would be the possibility, however theoretical, that we could work our way through the league system and eventual win the Premier League. Although it is unlikely, it is possible. Indeed, there are many recent examples of clubs formed (or finding themselves) in obscurity that have managed to pursue and achieve significant national success (e.g. Wimbledon FC, Wigan Athletic, and even Manchester City). Such grassroots beginnings and club evolution are non-existent in American professional sports where teams have no original background or unique identity but are all pre-ordained and pre-packaged business propositions.
Additionally, the FA Cup is a trophy competition open to every and any team, amateur or professional, in England and Wales. This means that it would be possible for a pub team to meet (and beat!) Manchester United in the final at Wembley. Again, unlikely but possible. Although FA Cup history is filled with countless tales of small, local clubs defeating their professional and often far more illustrious counterparts. Each year there are always the shock results of Davids beating Goliaths; results that are relished by neutrals and epitomize the “magic” of the competition.
Lastly, although the monopolized nature of the American leagues ensures that they can procure and present the best sporting talent, and despite the best efforts of the marketing gurus and compliant media to manufacture excitement and drama, the leagues remain so artificial that the matches remain utterly devoid of sport’s true nature and meaning. And by sport’s true nature and meaning, I refer to values that go beyond the skills and techniques required to play the given sport at the highest level, and embrace broader, intangible elements such as passion, romance, belonging, ambition, opportunity, uncertainty, and hope. In the United States, all of the latter are effectively absent due to the contrived and fabricated nature of the system. One can dress the games up and manipulate the process all one likes but, ultimately, American professional sports provide little more than exhibition matches.
Having said all this, I can fully understand why some people might want to attend a professional sports game in the United States. There is the razzmatazz, the spectacle, and if you are genuinely interested in, for example, baseball or basketball, then, as mentioned above, the leagues unquestioningly provide the best players and coaches in the nation. One can admire and appreciate sporting prowess without committing to fandom. Nevertheless, to become a fan of one team, supporting them week-in week-out, and to be somehow emotionally attached to them, is a completely different thing to merely spectating. With this in mind, the key questions still remain: how gullible do you have to be to invest time, money, and emotional energy to support such a shamelessly contrived creation? What possible connection can fans feel towards a team whose only relationship with them is, at best, solely geographical (which is itself tenuously provisional)? And, alarmingly, what kind of psychological desperation is required to make someone seek attachment and belonging in a corporate franchise? It would be like dressing up as Ronald McDonald to cheer on the nearest located McDonald’s. It seems that supporting an American professional sports team is sad and absurd in equal measure.
