Living for Live Sport
Like many, I’ve been watching the World Cup. It’s made me reflect on my maybe-I’m-too-obssessed-with-it relationship with football.
(By football I mean soccer. Well, I mean football. But for Americans, I mean soccer. Although I’m not one of those non-Americans who bizarrely think the worst thing about America is the word soccer. I’m happy to z my s's and drop redundant u's and say the word soccer to add clarification.)
I’m conflicted about this maybe-obsession with football.
I pay for expensive tickets, sit through bad weather, and wake up at 3am1. All despite research that shows the highs of being a sports fan are outweighed by the lows.
It’s not all bad. It helps with small-talk. Although sometimes it creates confused looks. Especially among well-educated folks. You know the type: people who have opinions on the Oxford comma, Noah Baumbach films, and the Sapir-Worf hypothesis2.
Well educated people don’t understand it. They’ll be sure to be roughly up to date with the world cup or the Olympics. They’ll concede that elite athletes demonstrate impressive skill. Perhaps aesthetic beauty is even achieved on occasion. But the question invariably remains: Why do millions attach such excessive importance to sport? Why am I obsessed?
They might have a point. To borrow a phrase from Theodore Dalrymple, society’s obsession with sport might be the manifestation of human stupidity. There’s the biased shallow punditry from ex-players bereft of statistical understanding. The banal post-match interviews from players explaining the need to “focus on the next game, one at a time”. Then there are the autobiographies. The mind-numbing career outlines that are half ghost written to not much avail. These autobiographies inspired David Foster Wallace’s conjecture that an athlete's lack of insight and sincere belief in cliches are more of a feature than a bug. (It truly does help to focus on the next game, one at a time.)
Then we have the saturation of highlight reels, increasingly packed schedules, and half time shows. It all starts to resemble prole feed. In a secular world, sport is the opium of the masses. In a rich world, where we don't worry about bread, sport is the circus3.
This specific world cup in Qatar adds corruption, human rights complaints, and sports washing to the list of things to complain about.
As I said, I’m conflicted about this maybe-obsession.
Although sport has plenty of stupidity from players and fans, it’s not its defining characteristic. A better candidate is tribalism (which is perhaps both a cause and consequence of stupidity).
Evolutionary psychologists have been telling us at least since the 90s that tribal impulses are fundamental to human nature4. If you think you are uniquely non-tribal, that’s just your tribalism talking.
Let's set concerns of unfalsifiability aside for a moment. If tribalism really is unavoidable, perhaps it’s better to satiate this impulse via sport rather than politics and the culture wars. Supporters of the blue team viscerally hating the supporters of the red team (and vice versa) is less destructive when the teams in question are setting play routines rather than policies. Sport fans still talk to their uncles at thanksgiving.
Tribalism rightfully comes in for criticism. It’s divisive, kind of by definition. The only thing we tend to agree with the other tribe is that the out-group is is terrible and wrong about everything.
But there are positive aspects of being part of a tribe. This is discussed in Sebastion Junger’s 2016 book aptly named “Tribe”. Namely, the tribe can bring an invaluable sense of community and interdependence. This sense is exactly what many of us feel deprived of in modern increasingly secular society.
Supporting a team may assuage this loss of community. At least in part. Look at the typical behavior of a typical fan at a typical game. He or she will be participating in mass synchrony.
Mass synchrony is the state of experiencing the same thing as others at the same time.
Mass synchrony fosters solidarity.
As Kevin Simler explains: Sports can be viewed as a modern ritual of solidarity:
This is why sports can become so tantalizingly close to religious in nature. Both sports and religions are about binding human communities together.
In this way, sports may even partly fill our god-shaped hole. During games, with thousands of others, we leave Durkheim’s level of the profane and approach the sacred. We satiate our need to belong.
There aren’t many other activities that reliably achieve this level of solidarity. Sport connects us with our fellow humans in the same way that joining clubs, dancing, and watching the annual public fireworks display all do. Though sports can achieve this with greater numbers by an order of magnitude: 500 million around Earth watched the last football World Cup final.
Freud described an oceanic feeling: a feeling of being one with the external world as a whole.
Sports fans access this feeling.
I felt it after seeing opposing fans unable to hold back tears after losing a championship. I felt it when hugging a stranger as my country qualified for the World Cup. David Foster Wallace felt it during his stay in Italy that coincided with a different World Cup.
It feels odd to allude to Freud and Durkheim and sacredness when talking about sport. It’s just a game after all. It’s arbitrary. It’s wasteful5. It’s now a billion dollar industry where money often trumps loyalty.
Despite these drawbacks, sport still offers this oceanic feeling. This glimpse of the sacred.
As I said, I’m conflicted.
Interestingly, we still prefer watching live sports even when we’re not there in the flesh. My girlfriend was confused why I was getting up at 4am instead of watching a replay. A replay isn’t the same.
Perhaps there’s a Bayesian argument for this: When watching a game live, anything can happen. Well, almost anything: the speed of light won't be broken and the LA Clippers will choke in the playoffs, but if you're watching a recording, it's more likely to just be a game. An interconnected world means we will instantly know about any “marginally insane event”. Try watching a recording of the Oscars (if you are one of the few people who still watch the Oscars) without knowing about the slap.
This may explain that uneasy deterministic feeling we get when watching a recording despite not knowing the result. But I’d bet this effect is a small marginal effect. It doesn’t drive our main motivation to watch live sport.
Watching live sport at home matters for the same reason that going to live sport in the flesh matters: Solidarity. We may be separated geographically but we are still synchronous temporally. We are part of something bigger than ourselves. We are celebrating our team’s win with millions of others and lamenting their loss in synchrony.
I’m conflicted. But it’s something I cherish, so I won’t stop going to the circus anytime soon.
This is more of a function of living in an awkward timezone, alas.
Sensible, consistently good, and severely overstated, respectively.
Again, taken from Theodore Dalrymple.
Think of the opportunity cost of a lifetime devoted to swimming or running 1 millisecond faster.