Fandom and Social Connection

My guess is that any benefits are cancelled out by the negative effects for fans of opposing teams and non-fans (speaking from experience as a non-fan). But I don’t really see how watching TV can be at all comparable to actually playing in a club, let alone unions or churches. I guess it’s all relative and by Gen Z standards Beavis and Butthead were model republicans…

More seriously, the relatively young Substack Eleven Named People, by the South African public intellectual Sean Jacobs, is built on a closely related premise to that of the Harvard Kennedy School program discussed here: that folk are more likely to be interested in politics and international relations when they are discussed in the context of sport than when they are discussed alone.

It’s a striking feature of the US (as compared to Australia for example) that “sports” means fandom rather than playing sport. I’ve been pointing out for a while that team and club sport has largely replaced religion in Australia. Parkrun (originally UK) a particularly striking example.

“How else would there be Cleveland Browns fans?” he joked.

Max Stirner (rooting for the Patriots) and Jeremy Bentham (rooting for the Cowboys) were also wondering about this: Friedrich Nietzsche offered them an explanation:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/273

The hope is that a shared passion not rooted in politics can bypass the anger triggers that politics is loaded with, and some semblance of conversation and connection can drop little seeds that could sprout later, somehow.

US Major Leagues attempt to bridge gaps in their fanbases, they have various Woke salutes and military colors and flyovers, something for everyone to complain about and ignore, since its over in a few minutes. The SF Giants had a Pride support event that had athlites wearing Pridey hats, which some marked with Bible verses about how the Gays don’t own the rainbow. So there’s always some friction.

An appropriate test of the legitimacy of the hope noted byCheez Whiz @9 might come in comparison of, say, the United States’ multiple fandoms with something like the pillarized socio-political society of the turn-of-the-20th-c. Netherlands or the economically and politically active Islamic brotherhoods and Catholicism in contemporary Senegal.

The question is in what circumstances can belonging to rival but structurally similar economically and politically powerful ritual-practice communities produce sociopolitical harmony rather than discord. The unique point of sports fandom is that it makes (usually limited) claims as to political content (perhaps bracketing such things like the allegiance-pledge-kneeling controversy around Colin Kaepernick in the US to the extent to which it is appropriate to so bracket them), whereas in pillarized societies, the ritual cosmology is politicized almost all the way down, so to speak.

“Football brings people together” seems to be FIFA doctrine, judging by Tom Cruise’s World Cup final sermon:
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/general/fans-baffled-by-tom-cruise-s-pre-world-cup-final-ted-talk-as-hollywood-icon-makes-bizarre-speech/ar-AA28f3I9

At least it brought Trump together with the winning team:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jul/19/donald-trump-world-cup-final

MisterMr <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/21/fandom-and-social-connection/#comment-878436>@12:

I’ll admit not being too familiar with Jonathan Haidt. A pop psychologist and computational scientist who seems to also mix Émile Durkheim and utilitarian in his tea? Surely not all citations of Durkheim are also invocations of Haidt. Durkheim pioneered a series of moves in which a researcher can basically bracket certain seemingly load-bearing claims about religion (the filioque clause! whether the South Asian Muslim diaspora in the Caribbean should face east or west when praying toward Mecca! who’s better—the Colts or the Patriots! etc.), or at least approach them without asserting a conclusion about their truth value.

Now plenty of people (and apparently this Haidt guy?) have taken Durkheim in a give me that old-time religion! direction, but the more fundamental utility of D.’s work is in allowing us to do things like moving from discussing ritual ablutions to discussing hospital sanitation regulations, or from Sunday morning church services to Sunday afternoon game-times, without needing to change analytical registers.

I largely agree with you as to the limits of fandom as a socially generative exercise, if for different reasons. A person may be a fan of the Bad News Bears, the local youth baseball team. Or (or “and”) they may be a fan of the Gini-index-aggravating vanity club owned by a billionaire in the nearest metropolis. Especially if we mix an interest with fandom with a utilitarian interest, we get really strange results, like: let’s increase societal inequality so that rich-person-owned teams can be sufficiently well-capitalized as to have their socially constitutive fandoms spread over great distances, increasing societal cohesion! Which is just silly. “Fandom” as a subject, is hard to meaningfully analyze separate from the thing of which the fan is, well, a fan.

MisterMr @16:

Ah, that makes sense. I haven’t encountered Durkheim much discussing conflict either, though to date his only work that I’ve read straight through is Formes élémentaires. He was behind a good heaping helping of theoretical language used in anthropology of religion (at least as of the beginning of this c.), but I never came across a professor who assigned him, and didn’t read him until after leaving uni. The general idea seems to have been to have the Durkheimian comparativist cake without eating his well-superseded social-evolutionary claims.

In any event, in one of Formes‘ discussions of phratries, at II.iii.2, he says:

La où l’une des phratries est préposée à la paix, l’autre est préposée à la guerre ; si l’une a l’eau pour totem, l’autre a pour totem la terre. C’est là, sans doute, ce qui explique que les deux phratries aient été souvent conçues comme naturellement antagonistes l’une de l’autre. On admet qu’il y a entre elles une sorte de rivalité et même d’hostilité constitutionnelle. L’opposition des choses s’est étendue aux personnes ; le contraste logique s’est doublé d’une sorte de conflit social.

But that’s really just a stopover on his way to universalizing the Aristotelian genus, so it doesn’t invalidate your point that he does not dwell on it, even as he does acknowledge its presence from an early “stage” of his diachronic development model.

And I’m totally on-board with the challenge of easily creating mass meaning-making ritual orders capable of counteracting the negative effects of other durable mass programs.

Rather I was saying that the US has only fandom in the sense being described here, particularly in relation to team sports providing a basis for social interaction

Frankly, this is simply not true. Here’s a personal example: when I lived in Philadelphia I was part of a “canoe club” – a group that does canoeing and kayaking. It turns out that these things are all over the place. They work to get people into canoeing and kayaking, put together trips, teach lessons, rent and/or loan gear, and also do a lot of social events. There are literally thousands of these all over the US (and there is a sort of umbrealla organization above them, which helps with insurance, lobbying for access, etc. In fact, there are two of them – the Amercian Canoe Association, which is similar to the Australian one, except it’s much more focused on grass-roots actions rather than on organizing olympic disciplines, like the Australian one is – and “American Whitewater”, which is focused on river access and promoting the sport. But this is just a start. There are many thousands of recreational softball leagues, hocky leagues, pickle ball leagues, and so on, all over. The place is just full of these things. They are everywhere, and easy to find. In this case, you simply do not know what you’re talking about. It’s fine that you don’t know this about the US. It’s hard to know a lot about a place that you’ve not really been to in a long time, and are not close to people in. But also, in that case, you should not speak as if you do know it. This claim is just flat-out wrong.

This was prompted by the dispute between Matt and JQ which is, I think, an empirical disagreement. (I’m not sure, it might be conceptual — is canoeing as Matt describes it a sport according to JQ? Is triathalon for that matter?). My only data point: last summer about 350,000 adults played cricket regularly in the UK. That’s cricket, not football (and mostly England). According to the FA around 2.2 million played football in organised teams (I think that includes kids though: I don’t know about adults). According the wikipedia 540,000 adults play cricket regularly in Australia. I’m very curious what the US participation figure are for similarly popular sports, but for American Football I’d guess it is nowhere close.

What distinguishes the US from most countries is the staggering amount of public funding that goes to sports which are corporate and highly profitable, both in talent development and fostering an audience. The talent development funding is also highly unequal, directed mostly at youngsters from higher income families, and, maybe obviously, only youngsters who are talented. What is particularly shocking is that it goes largely to sports which, with one exception (basketball), hardly anybody plays competitively unless they become a professional (or, in college, effectively a semi-professional). It’s done through the public education system (specifically the traditional public schools), and does a lot of collateral damage: useless math, social studies, health teachers who are hired because they’ll be good athletic coaches over people who would be somewhat better actual teachers, and who devote their time and energy to coaching not teaching. American Football is the worst, because in secondary school participation is highly limited, very highly funded, and it is a sport which nearly everyone stops playing immediately after they leave the education system.

My impression after living my whole adult life in the US is that fandom is much much more directed at ‘big’ teams than small ones. Madison people love the Packers and the Brewers… and Chelsea!, but not the Mallards or the Flamingos (to be fair the only Flamingos game I went to was dreadful and ended in a huge punch up from which, disappointingly for an Englishman, seemed restricted to the players — no fans were allowed to join in). My facebook, by contrast, is full of fans of Oxford United, Slough Town, Cheltenham Town (and the Cheltenham Tigers, that guy loves his home town!) Evesham United…

I’ll stick to team sports, since they are the ones most relevant to the OP and my comment, As I said, and Harry notes, virtually no American adults, other than pros, play baseball or American football, the sports with the biggest fandom. I don’t know anything about (ice) hockey, but it doesn’t seem to have much in the way of organised teams below the semi-pro level, so I’m dubious about the claim of thousands of leagues there.

As for recreational softball (and basketball) leagues, aren’t they mainly the “municipal leagues run on a year-to-year basis” to which I referred? AFAICT, the teams mostly don’t endure over long periods, or have much social structure beyond people turning up for games and maybe a weekly practice session during the season. They don’t seem like a promising vehicle for boundary-crossing social connection. As Matt notes, I haven’t lived in the US for a while, so better-informed readers can set me straight.

Softball leagues in the US are often long-running, and the teams are sometimes tied to one’s workplace. (I spent many years going to my father’s softball games, and the teams they played were largely the same – or as much the same as any can be – over time. People I know who play softball now seem to suggest the same thing.)
I was curious, so I looked up how many people play “Ultimate Frisbee” in organized leagues. It was alway a bit of a niche sport, but it seems to have had about 5 million people playing in leages at its peak in the early 2000s, and between 1.5-2 million doing so now.
“Beer league” Hockey teams are fairly regional – you’ll find them more in the North East, Minnesota, etc. But, in those places, they are fairly common. (I used to have to end my ice skating lessons to get out of the ice ring for the beer league games when I lived in Philadelphia.)
Apparently flag football (for both men and women) has become popular, though I’m not sure how many people play it. (Google suggests “millions”, but that’s pretty vague.) See here: https://usftl.sportngin.com/
On the organization of things, the US is in general much less centrally organized than most countries. Given its population and size, this makes sense, though it’s not always good. This applies to sports, too. (Supposedly more people regularly play golf in the US than live in all of Australia. No wonder it’s easier to have larger-level organization here!)

One complication in the United States is that fandom is intertwined with higher education to a greater degree than anyplace else. Lots of fandom comes from–especially–where a person got their undergrad degree, or the closest university that plays sports.

Which leads to weird things like the president of Ohio State saying of a winning football coach, who was under investigation for an ethical lapse, “I hope he doesn’t fire me.”

Or my favourite, said by George Lynn Cross, when a state legislature asked him why he was always asking for more money, “I would like to build a University of which the football team could be proud.”

Almost anybody in Iowa City, Tuscaloosa, or Ann Arbor can tell you how the football team is doing. Very few have any idea where their university stands in rankings of academic reputation. (Which is not to say those rankings are particularly valid.)