Why is watching sports so popular?

I live in a college town, or rather I live in a big city that acts like a college town (Columbus, home of Ohio State). Today everyone at work is wearing their Ohio State jerseys because of the game tonight (which I just found out about).

This is not to say I don’t like sports. I love playing sports. I’m up for a game of anything, anytime. It’s also not to say I don’t like watching them. I really like baseball games in person, watching UFC fights on TV (and in person), and love the Olympics.

It’s just that I don’t get the obsession with televised sports. A good friend of mine tried to explain it one time, he is a former athlete and a very smart guy. When I watch football with him it’s entertaining because he knows all the players, the plays, the business of it, etc. He can explain it to me in a way I can appreciate. When I watch by myself or with other sports fans I get bored in 10 minutes. There is also a fair amount of ridicule that goes on in this city if you aren’t up to speed on who Urban Myer or Travis Tickle or Johnny Lockjaw is. If you try to make a comment and get a name wrong, people take you as some out of touch alien.

To each his own, and it’s certainly exciting to see people get excited about sports. Hell, I know triggercut is a big sports guy and he’s a super interesting, smart person. So why do I have no interest in sports? What am I missing? Anyone else feel this way? I just cant’ be bothered, never could be. The only way sports on TV seems to affect me is that Gotham got delayed a few months while Monday night football was on. :)

Beats me, dude. I don’t watch any sports, ever. But we’re a tiny minority.

Sports often scratches that special tribal itch, I think. “Our team,” “those other guys,” “we’re winning!” Etc. Somehow, you get a sense of belonging and accomplishment from watching a team of people who are much stronger/faster/more coordinated than you do impressive physical things with a bunch of other people.

For others, it’s all about the storylines and/or statistics. Watching a rookie grow from a good prospect to a championship caliber-superstar, the tension of whether or not an aging player will eke out one more good season of rebounds to make it into the top 5 in history, the freak anomaly of a never-before-seen game situation, etc.

And for others, it’s probably other stuff. I don’t really jive with any of it (for instance, I just found out that North Carolina–a state I’ve lived in for going on 4 years now–has a professional football team, solely because I walked into a bar for a friend’s birthday on Saturday and saw a bunch of dour looking people in faux-uniforms watching said team lose and drinking heavily), but hey, to each their own. And I do watch pro Starcraft religiously, which I think tickles many of the same itches.

I’m another ‘sports, meh’ person. If I’m at a bar I can watch a game. At home the wife has to beg me to put a Seahawks game on. It’s just not a priority for me. I can always find something better to do. I was a big NY Rangers fan in the past, but now I’m not even sure when the season starts.

I’m not the world’s biggest sports fan. But the answer is: Because sports are a microcosm for the entirety of the human experience.

  • Drama: A good game is a well paced story. It has highs and lows, improbable comebacks, the agony of defeat, etc. A lot of people wouldn’t say they watch sports for the drama, but people don’t just look at the score after the game: they want to feel the feels during the game. This gets multiplied all the way down the chain: each game has a story, but so does each player, or each coach, or each team.
  • Beauty: There’s something inherently appealing about seeing peak physical specimens doing impossible things. It’s Greek statuary, made flesh.
  • History / Identity: Having a team makes you part of a thing. It’s a connection to your past (esp. College) or your region, or your childhood. When you root for College of University, hating your rivals at University State isn’t just hating them now, it’s hating them from 100 years ago on behalf of your own long dead forbears.
  • Bloodlust: There’s a little of this too, although probably less than some people would indicate. Moreso in some sports that others.
  • Cultural Capital: As you said, everybody else is doing it. When my aunt immigrated to the US (Los Angeles) from Taiwan, she asked my Dad for advice about how to fit in in an american workplace. His advice: “Watch the Lakers”. It gives you something to talk about, something to connect over at the water cooler.

Failing all that, there’s always gambling.

There are lots of other places to get all of these, so there’s no reason you need to watch sports. As you noted also, of course the pull of these become stronger the more invested you get into them.

Incidentally, this list also justifies watching the WWE.

I feel exactly the same way about spectator sports. Despite growing up in a college town I’ve never deep down understood why people will devote such a large percentage of their time and energy to obsessing over whether a bunch of strangers win or lose a completely contrived competition.

I mean, I can give all sorts of intellectual explanations, like how all the rules and clean results give order to an otherwise chaotic world, or how it’s a (mostly) harmless outlet for my-side-right-or-wrong tribalism, or how the sheer amount of stats a sport generates gives the obsessively inclined something to obsess over. But even knowing all those explanations I still can’t make myself feel interested.

The really interesting question is, are we spectator sports skeptics blessed or cursed? Does this small minority see more clearly, or are we tune deaf?

Not caring about spectator sports does clear up large amount of free time. Which I mostly spend playing games. Hmm.

I’m not a skeptic, I just don’t enjoy it, so I don’t watch it. I also don’t watch soap operas and infomercials.

My parents don’t watch sports either, but my brother does. So maybe it’s a recessive gene.

As slightly evolved apes, we could start by maybe trying to see when watching sports started historically? That might provide a clue? The why etc? I’ve played more sport than watched, and as a rule i enjoy the actual competition over the more passive armchair approach, BUT, well you sort of do ‘play’ the sport you watch just in your mind. So maybe that mental activity (how ever simple or detailed it gets, person depending) itself is a reflection on this more primitive historical reason ‘for sport’ as a spectator thing?

I’m not the biggest sports fan, but I do enjoy a couple sports enough to watch some games on TV. For basketball, I can watch the local NBA team but I can’t handle watching random NBA games and I think being forced to watch college hoops would constitute some sort of torture if I were subjected to it.

Football on the other hand I can watch on TV, although I typically DVR it and then start watching when the game’s about half over, so I skip over all the commercials. I love watching football. It’s a game that requires eleven people working together like a machine. Every single one is an extremely important part of the team’s success. And it’s not just the physical aspect, what a good quarterback has to process and analyze for those few seconds before the snap is amazing, especially when they have to deliver a ball to where they think a receiver’s shoulder is going to be a few seconds and 30 yards later, all the while having some 300-pound brute charging full speed to smash them into the dirt. It’s amazing to me.

I’m not a fanatic or anything, I don’t religiously watch games and I don’t get overly hyped, but I’ll take that unscripted drama and action over a lot of other shows on television.

Rather than agreeable yes men you find in every “am I weird?” thread, let me say that I do watch sports but I wish I didn’t.

For me, the statistics and the analysis are what take it from lazy waste of time on a Sunday afternoon to an obsession. I’m sure that’s part of my wiring. Check my post count.

I think it’s ultimately meaningless, so that’s why I want to move on. Fortunately I seem to be doing a tour of various sports where I get to the point where I don’t need to watch closely anymore. It’s the same way with all the genres I’m checking off from my video game backlog.

FWIW, playing team sports never stuck but I enjoy individual “sports” and competition.

I hated sports up until my Senior year in college. I joined a fantasy football league, and the rest is history.

To me, the love is the drama, the live unfiltered moments (which are rare on TV nowadays) and the statistics.

Sports is super nerdy now as well. Particularly fantasy sports, where dedication to statistics and spreadsheets are rewarded in a game that is played out live week to week.

Good point about the nerd factor, Jon. The jocks and random middle aged people wearing jerseys seem like the oddballs now compared to geeks writing blog posts!

Not to mention they’re unionized. The labor disputes and blackmail for new stadiums always make me roll my eyes. Or you get arbitrary rules and cheap labor from college sports to keep Big Education going. I’ve largely stopped paying attention to politics but I see plenty of it in the sports world. It’d be nice to leave that behind.

Cave paintings have been found in the Lascaux caves in France that have been suggested to depict sprinting and wrestling in the Upper Paleolithic around 17,300 years ago.[1][2] Cave paintings in the Bayankhongor Province of Mongolia dating back to Neolithic age of 7000 BC show a wrestling match surrounded by crowds.[3] Neolithic Rock art found at the cave of swimmers in Wadi Sura, near Gilf Kebir in Libya has shown evidence of swimming and archery being practiced around 6000 BC.[4] Prehistoric cave paintings have also been found in Japan depicting a sport similar to sumo wrestling.[5]

Sprinting, wrestling and Archery. Most of those are to do with hunting food or general physical prowess. So it seems likely the spectator thing just naturally came after the acts? the rest of the tribe gathering round to see who was the fastest to chase down the prey etc?

Sports are the original reality show. Plus you can bet on them.

I’ve never understood watching sports either, but generally thought this meant I was not fully male. I’m pretty nerdy and sessile, but I’ve enjoyed playing some sports. Very specific ones, namely fencing in college, and car racing in games, though of course the latter is only a simulation. Doing makes sense to me, even for sports I personally hate playing like basketball, but watching seems weird. Yet it’s very, very popular.

Aside from appreciating the sport itself and deriving some pleasure from seeing it played at the highest levels, sports are ways that people identify and connect with others. If you meet someone you have nothing else in common with, you stand a decent chance of connecting through the local sports team (even, and perhaps especially, if they happen to routinely suck). Meeting up with family you haven’t seen in ages and never bothered to follow on Facebook? Talk sports. Have you ever watched a movie that you own while it’s being broadcast on television? How about a repeat of a favorite episode? How many times have you watched Rocky Horror/Princess Bride/whatever these young whippersnappers watch these days? It’s a similar pseudo-social connection to all of that.

Then you have some interesting “spectator effect” types of things going on, where watching not only enhances the feeling of community but also can be felt to influence their performance (there is both literal and figurative ways to approach this: viewership indirectly increases revenue for the teams, but then you also have the “They might not have won if I didn’t watch” fun separation from reality that goes with it). I think my favorite examples are when people call into sports talk shows and act as if their behavior somehow influences how the team will play. I can’t count the number of times I hear “We can’t be satisfied, and need to stay hungry” or “We can’t let this get us down” kinds of comments on the airwaves. That “we” isn’t really referring to the team except in the most tangential sort of way. None of the callers work for those organizations, and they’re well aware of it. It’s talking about the fans, and how they feel connected to what goes on between the lines. It’s a community and a tradition, and if teams and fans can tap into each other like that, then it can be quite powerful & uplifting for everyone involved.

It’s in our DNA. Don’t watch sports, not a real man.

I can’t speak for other sports fans, but following a team is fun.

It’s not just watching the games, it’s following the players, watching and judging and rating how they perform, following and discussing and dissecting transactions…would Player A be an upgrade at second over Player B? Should we trade Player X for Player Y? It’s a near-full-time avocation where you get to know the players and how they perform on the field. It’s not that much different than playing a game youself, really…it just mostly takes place in your mind.

Besides, it’s exciting to watch someone who’s better at playing a game than most of us will probably ever be at anything in our lives play their game well.

Don’t forget it can be fun to follow the stats. Personally, I love hockey and soccer, but I also love tracking the players and teams year to year. It not only scratches the “ra-ra sports” itch, but the analytic one as well.

I’ll also watch curling because I play and understand the sport even better because of it.

Maybe the OP hasn’t found the sport for him? Just because you don’t like football doesn’t mean you may not like something like rugby or golf or curling, etc.

Yeah. It’s not unusual to hear people (usually when talking about twitch) say something like “I never understood the appeal of following a sports team…until <DoTA / Starcraft / LoL>”. For whatever reason, a lot of people click with some sports but not others. e-Sports lack the beauty of the physical human form, but they deliver on almost every other front, and some people probably find it easier to relate to, especially if they don’t have a pre-existing affection for a particular sport from playing or watching as a youth.

My WWE comment upthread wasn’t completely snarky. I think WWE serves a lot of the same fuinctions as more tradtional spectator sports.