Professional Sports

Why?

Professional sports players are experts in highly trained skills, offering benefit and value through their performance. Unlike some professionals, they don’t directly interact with clients – instead, they perform, like actors and musicians, and people pay to watch.

Sports which involve teams that move and control a type of ball or object towards some target, get the most attention: Baseball, soccer, football, hockey, basketball, rugby, cricket… According to at least one sports tracking entity, soccer has more than 3 billion fans – that’s the majority of all adults alive everywhere on the planet.

Huge chunks of humanity passionately follow and watch other people who they don’t know personally, move an object across a small area, to get it specifically somewhere else in that area. Half the planet expends their time, energy and money to watch someone they don’t know do something inherently meaningless, something that for most people has zero impact on their own life and in their own space.

They associate themselves with a group of strangers – a team – with whom they have zero personal connection, and refer to that team as “their team”.

Competition goes beyond players on the field. It expands to the team’s followers, who might even physically fight with other people who associate themselves with another team. Personal identity expands to a team - a person is a “team X” fan.

Why? What payoff does being a sports fan provide, that is obviously a basic human one, that cuts across continents, countries, religions and cultures?

Several, I postulate.

1. When I follow a team and a player, I associate with someone who does something very well. Doesn’t matter what they’re doing well, but whatever they’re doing, they do it well, and so, by association I feel an endorphin rush because I think I’m doing well, by association. Imagined association, though. The player and team know nothing about me. I’ve got an imagined meaningful and invigorating connection with well-performing people.

2. There are designated times and days when “my” team plays, so I make those times important. I look forward to watching the game. Time periods become meaningful.

3. I allocate time to associate with friends and have quality social time, watching my team together with them. We might even play that sport ourselves, between ourselves, imagining ourselves almost as good as the pros. Knowing that countless other people are also emotionally involved in the sport and my team, make me feel like I belong to something big, much larger than myself. I’ve got rich and deep meaningful belonging.

Professional sports provide me with purpose, meaning and connection. Those are biggies in the human psyche space.

Those same biggies are provided by religion, in similar fashion.

I imagine a relationship with an imagined super-being. Lots of my time is allocated for god-related activities. I do these things with many others and I know that many others I don’t know are doing the same thing. I imagine, and have been told by many authority figures and previous generations, that this super-being is a super being. I’ve got purpose, meaning and connection all held together by an imagined association with some super-performer and its co-followers.

There is however a big difference between religion and professional sports: One of them actually has an actual super-performer who is continually tested and exhibits his performance to verifiable accountability, by metrics everyone agrees upon.