Americans and Sports


I went to s college football game in Missouri , Tigers v South Carolina. , there was 80,000 home vans and a bus load of away fans , when I commented on this my pal replied , it’s a 3hr plane ride or two days by car for SC fans. That puts into perspective away days lol. Most fans over there love our promotion and relegation , if we could have their draight system and a wage limit which would prevent the top clubs hoovering up the best players , football would benefit so much in Europe.
RJ?
 
Tribalism in American football is all about the college game not NFL. The armchair fans follow NFL , college football is all about attending ( home games at least , as Iposted earlier away games can be thousands off miles apart ). People who attended college at a uni , have season tickets all their lives , my pal lives in Phoenix and flies back for the Tigers games , am b not sure how far it is to Columbia in Missouri from Phoenix but you can bet it makes Carlisle to Exeter look like an afternoon out.
 
I think anyone that thinks that American fans aren't every bit as passionate as British or global fans would be naïve at best.

Living in NJ, I am in close proximity to an actual rivalry NY Giants and Philadelphia Eagles - now these games have fans of both sides in attendance, and although the singing, chanting is different the passion and abuse and the banter handed out is no different.

Yes season tickets are a huge thing here, I know that there are waiting lists for Giants season tickets, with them being passed down through multiple generations (especially for the highly sought after sitting areas).

Your last four questions, are all resounding YES

The franchise thing is a little different, to the UK.... The Raiders from there 70's/80's reputation get a lot of followers around the country who don't really care about the location of the city. Franchises outside the main ones are much more mobile things and you are a Raiders or a Chargers fan more than an Oakland or San Diego fans.
Steelers season tickets have a waiting list as well. they have fans all over the country that are passionate an their team. I have die hard Giants fans where I live as well. There are passion within these groups make no mistake. It’s just that consequences of losing is just like having a bruised ego
 
I'm not American, I'm from Houghton. I only lived there three years.

So I can only speak from a very limited experience, but I worked with tons of different people and watched various sports all over the country when I was there.

Firstly teams that move do so fairly infrequently and always for money. When a team is leaving a place it is usually somewhere with minimal support or interest moving to a market with strong demand for the missing sports team. The odds of the Giants or the Yankees leaving New York is zero. I'm sure the relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers caused a lot of upset back in the day, but teams like the Raiders and the Rams have moved a few times so the support in the city they leave behind isn't that deep rooted.

There are a few fans of "franchises" who support the same team wherever they end up, but the vast majority of sports fans I knew supported their local team only, and they were all teams that would never leave NY.

Season ticket holders definitely do exist. I had one for the Rangers. You aren't getting into the Giants or the Jets without one. Fortunately they haven't had the same issues with crowd violence we had in the 70s and 80s (though I have seen rival supporters chinning each other at Madison Square Garden and Giants Stadium), so once you have a season ticket you can re-sell tickets to individual games to anyone you like, as long as it's not within quarter of a mile of the stadium. I got tickets for all games and all sports through StubHub without issue and sold them there myself.

Away fans not so much. There were always a section or two of away fans at Madison Square Garden, and I've been an away fan at a Washington Capitals game, but I think they turn up because they are there already rather than travelling specifically to watch the team, at least in regular season. I saw the Jets play Miami and there were very few away fans, but against the Steelers there was a couple of thousand of them (a decent minority of whom got pissed and fighty) - I assume this is just down to relative distances between teams, and NFL also has that tailgating culture of BBQs and drinking in the parking lot that people are more likely to travel for.

Depth of passion depends on the sport and the team. There are definitely Yankees and Red Sox fans whose entire happiness rests on the performance of their team, but I don't think fans of (say) the Arizona Diamondbacks have the same level of passion. It was similar with the NY Rangers, who are the Sunderland of Ice Hockey. The lads I worked with who supported the NJ Devils or NY Islanders hated the Rangers, but Giants fans were indifferent to the Jets (the Jets big rivalry is with Miami for some reason), and Yankees fans care more about beating Boston than they do the Mets (NY - Boston seems to be a rivalry in all sports).

I think support runs in families, at least for NY teams, but I could never work out what the dividing line was between Jets and Giants or Mets and Yankees - it wasn't geographical.

Great post.

I was told that the NY/Boston rivalry stemmed from both having big Irish populations but may have been nonsense.

Weird that a lot team rivalry’s come from player rivalry’s too. Bird/Jordan, Namath/Marino (which feeds the Jets/Dolphins rivalry). Cult of celebrity I guess.
 
Steelers season tickets have a waiting list as well. they have fans all over the country that are passionate an their team. I have die hard Giants fans where I live as well. There are passion within these groups make no mistake. It’s just that consequences of losing is just like having a bruised ego
I'm married to a Steelers fan from NJ, its early here and I am still waking up so wanted to make the point with as little typing as possible.

Looking at my Giants fans who since winning 2 Super Bowls in 4 years have tanked badly I can tell you its a lot more than bruised egos. Jets fans are used to sucking so they take defeat a lot more acceptingly.
 
The legacy system is a thing in colleges. And the alumni system that nurtures post college involvement.

The US Collegiate is basically a pyramid scheme crosses with the masons.

Is it still a thing that a legacy (ie a close relative of an alumnus) will get automatic entry to that college?
 
There's an American, well quite a few actually as I live near the American school in my block of flats, but this one in particular works for espn, one day he wears a man Utd shirt then a week after he was wearing a man city shirt, I asked him how come and he said he likes soccer and gets the shirts for free. Says it all about the Americans and football for me.
To be fair I kind of understand that, it's not really any different from having multiple football team's shirts for 5-a-side. I rarely ever wear Sunderland tops playing football.
 
The Quebec Nordiques NHL ice hockey team moved from the French speaking area of Canada to Denver in America and became the Colorado Avalanche.

Imagine Sunderland being uprooted and taken to France!
 
Is it still a thing that a legacy (ie a close relative of an alumnus) will get automatic entry to that college?

I think the inclusivity and equal opportunities police might have changed the policy on that. But it’s still a thing.
 
Great post.

I was told that the NY/Boston rivalry stemmed from both having big Irish populations but may have been nonsense.

Weird that a lot team rivalry’s come from player rivalry’s too. Bird/Jordan, Namath/Marino (which feeds the Jets/Dolphins rivalry). Cult of celebrity I guess.
I suppose it makes sense for a bit of European tribalism to have carried over.


I used to wonder if Italian communities in the likes of NYC still followed football from 'the old country'.
 
Great post.

I was told that the NY/Boston rivalry stemmed from both having big Irish populations but may have been nonsense.

Weird that a lot team rivalry’s come from player rivalry’s too. Bird/Jordan, Namath/Marino (which feeds the Jets/Dolphins rivalry). Cult of celebrity I guess.
I think Jets v Dolphins is more down to them being the two teams in AFC East usually competing for second place. I never really considered a rivalry between Namath and Marino - they surely never played against each other? Namath will be 80 year old by now.
 
The Quebec Nordiques NHL ice hockey team moved from the French speaking area of Canada to Denver in America and became the Colorado Avalanche.

Imagine Sunderland being uprooted and taken to France!

Is this KLDs plan all along? Viva la relocation!
 
Some of our American based posters might be best placed to shed a bit more light on this, @burchmackem, @NYMackem, @njmackem etc...

With your various sports, franchises, conferences, teams moving across country etc - Do Americans actually get it? Are they just sports fans, or do they have supporters?

Take for instance when the Dodgers left Brooklyn - what the frig happened to their fans? Did they even have any? Were people upset?

More recently the Raiders have bounced from Oakland, to LA, back to Oakland, and now reside in a swanky new stadium in Las Vegas. This is a team with 3 Superbowls to it's name. Have all their fans bounced along with them? The ever faithful cross the Sierra Nevada every other week to cheer them on?

Do season ticket holders exist? Would Phase 3 ever be a thing?

Do grown men cry when success/abject failure rears it's head in the post-season?

Do fathers pass their loyalties onto their sons?

Are weekends completely ruined when their team loses?

Do they care?
My experience of Fans going to sports games in America seems to be driven by hot dogs, churros and pop/beer!

What you're driving at seems to be mostly associated with baseball IMO
 
I think Jets v Dolphins is more down to them being the two teams in AFC East usually competing for second place. I never really considered a rivalry between Namath and Marino - they surely never played against each other? Namath will be 80 year old by now.

I vaguely remember that Namath agreed to a clause to lose a game and the same thing was attempted to Marino. Hence the link. I may be miles out with this as NFL isn’t really my bag. More NBA and MLB.

Note to self ‘research before posting’!
 
Tribalism in American football is all about the college game not NFL. The armchair fans follow NFL , college football is all about attending ( home games at least , as Iposted earlier away games can be thousands off miles apart ). People who attended college at a uni , have season tickets all their lives , my pal lives in Phoenix and flies back for the Tigers games , am b not sure how far it is to Columbia in Missouri from Phoenix but you can bet it makes Carlisle to Exeter look like an afternoon out.
College football is a different beast, but at least in the North East where we have 7 franchises from DC to Boston its all about the NFL... Once you get down to Virginia/Maryland and further into Pennsylvania (Penn State) it becomes almost cultish with the college game. The south is almost all about the college game, and to a greater extent High School over the NFL
 

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