Americans and Sports


Any sporting event where there is such a thing as a ‘rally towel’ needs to be put out of its misery!
 
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!
or Cardiff being moved to Carlisle.

US and Canada is very intertwined with a lot of stuff.
 
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'.
I don't think so - Italian Americans are often 3rd, 4th or 5th generation, so their ancestors will have emigrated before those clubs existed (and possibly before Italy existed as a country). They all very loudly support Italy in the World Cup though.
 
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?
I lived in Seattle for a couple of years. The collage football team (American football) had a massive stadium and seemingly bigger following than the NFL team in the city. Most people that I spoke to didn't like the money etc in the nfl.

The husky stadium was 70,000 odd and they'd fill it.
 
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.
I couldn't even contemplate wearing another club or country's top. Why would ya?

The only other sports team I own something for is a couple of Yankees caps.
I don't think so - Italian Americans are often 3rd, 4th or 5th generation, so their ancestors will have emigrated before those clubs existed (and possibly before Italy existed as a country). They all very loudly support Italy in the World Cup though.
Aye - I was meaning more that kind of thing than Juve n Milan fans dotted about. :lol:

I went to a couple of bars in Little Italy and I can't remember now if I saw much football paraphernalia about or not.
 
Last edited:
I like watching some American sports but fan wise its always seems a bit sterile..a bit staged..the dressing up..the tailgate parties..I’ve been to a couple of NFL games at Wembley in the 80’s and there seems to be one song for every team..‘let’s go Rams let’s go’..‘let’s go Broncos let’s go’..even the MLS fans..they’re trying to copy over here but it just doesn’t work..there’s a video of some fans singing ‘the referees a wanker’..outside the ground and the game hasn’t even kicked off.
 
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.
Jets and Dolphins are in the same division so that could be the origin of their rivalry. Jets and Giants are in different conferences so rarely play each other.
 
I lived in Seattle for a couple of years. The collage football team (American football) had a massive stadium and seemingly bigger following than the NFL team in the city. Most people that I spoke to didn't like the money etc in the nfl.

The husky stadium was 70,000 odd and they'd fill it.
That's a tad besides the point though. There's filling stadiums with customers, and there's supporters.
:lol: FFS.
 
Last edited:
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

There were some very good documentaries on ESPN last year for the 150th anniversary of college football.
There was one about the SEC which claimed that the shame of losing the civil war for the South and the reconstruction period made a generation need to prove they were good at something, and college football was that thing.
 
I don’t believe there’s a “born into it” element at all here. Teams move, most are less than a generation old, and college is where it starts for them
So there’s no element of young bairns getting the bug for it and wanting to grow up to be their favourite player and play for “their” team?
 
Last edited:
I like watching some American sports but fan wise its always seems a bit sterile..a bit staged..the dressing up..the tailgate parties..I’ve been to a couple of NFL games at Wembley in the 80’s and there seems to be one song for every team..‘let’s go Rams let’s go’..‘let’s go Broncos let’s go’..even the MLS fans..they’re trying to copy over here but it just doesn’t work..there’s a video of some fans singing ‘the referees a wanker’..outside the ground and the game hasn’t even kicked off.
I found hockey to be the closest in atmosphere to proper football. A lot more shithousery than in other sports.

The best atmosphere I experienced out there was at MLS when Beckham's LA Galaxy played NY Red Bulls. Red Bulls used to get about 15,000 a game, but Giants stadium was 3/4 full for Beckham. He came out and everyone was clapping and cheering him. Then the game kicked off and every time he got within 5 feet of the ball he had 60,000 people booing him. Also of note that game - NY had a lightening quick 18 year old local lad playing up front that I was convinced would end up setting the Premier League alight: his name was Jozy Altidore :oops:.
 
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!
And then promptly won the Stanley Cup for the first time! Winnipeg lost their team but have since been given another.
 
I think there is some loyalty to the franchises geographically. A bloke I know from Tampa Bay Supports the Tampa Bay Lightning in the ice hockey and he is obsessed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL and his family are the same. The country is NFL mad wherever you go though and if you don’t have a local team I guess that is where the picking and choosing comes in.
 
I found hockey to be the closest in atmosphere to proper football. A lot more shithousery than in other sports.

The best atmosphere I experienced out there was at MLS when Beckham's LA Galaxy played NY Red Bulls. Red Bulls used to get about 15,000 a game, but Giants stadium was 3/4 full for Beckham. He came out and everyone was clapping and cheering him. Then the game kicked off and every time he got within 5 feet of the ball he had 60,000 people booing him. Also of note that game - NY had a lightening quick 18 year old local lad playing up front that I was convinced would end up setting the Premier League alight: his name was Jozy Altidore :oops:.
Atmosphere in Maddison Square Garden when NY Rangers are playing is fantastic, and the fans really know the game. Much better all round than when I've been to watch NHL games in Denver or New Jersey.
 
I lived in Seattle for a couple of years. The collage football team (American football) had a massive stadium and seemingly bigger following than the NFL team in the city. Most people that I spoke to didn't like the money etc in the nfl.

The husky stadium was 70,000 odd and they'd fill it.
Could this be the way football goes here? The money laden, sterile, made for TV Super league. The rest of us passionately support our local "college" team? Would that be such a bad thing?
 
I remember being in a bar in midtown Manhattan in Oct 2001..Yankees v Mariners ALCS game 4 on the telly..the bar was canny full..loads of young’uns in..the Yankees won in the 9th innings..we were expecting the place to go up..nowt..the odd high five here and there..we were looking at each other saying ‘they did win didn’t they’..would’ve been bedlam over here.
 
American here. I agree that college football is the closest thing you'll find. Particularly in the South where schools like LSU (Louisiana State) and Georgia are significantly more popular than the Saints and Falcons. Alabama/Auburn are in a world of their own. I'd reckon if the stadium was large enough, they could have 200,000+ fans at every game. The people there are often not even alums of the school, but through family bonds or simple local tribalism live their entire sporting lives through the fortunes of their football team. In those parts, the schools have been around far longer than the NFL. Other than MLB which has a well established history as old as English football, college sports have been around much longer than the pro sports. Basketball has the same pull in Indiana, Kentucky and North Carolina but not really anywhere else. The NBA has won that battle since 1980.
One big reason it makes sense is that the players actively chose to attend the school. Leaving aside all of the sleaze that comes with recruiting 14-17 year old kids, it's reasonable to believe the guys you are cheering for want to be attending and representing your school. In American pro sports, you go where you are told via the draft until you qualify to be a free agent and even then the vast majority go to whoever offers the most money. Young players can get traded and have no say in the decision. Does some star athlete from Miami or LA really want to live in Detroit or Kansas City?
I'm well in to my 40s now so I can't speak for the current crop of kids, but I can definitely have any day of the week ruined by the baseball team I've supported my entire life (my day was in the shitter by noon yesterday, stupid early game) and most of my weekends since 1997 have been ruined by a club in a country I've only traveled to once in my life. But I know I'm a rare breed.
 

Back
Top