Opinion: Both aspects of sports fandom and online fandom hold their own marks of repeated wrongdoing, but I want to examine where the freaks of these two facets of fandoms meet at a miserable melting pot: sports fans online.
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Sports fan culture in general is wack, regardless of the median. I could write an article about fans crowding at the opportunity for the signature of three-time Pro Bowler and 23-time court settler Deshaun Watson. I could point at Boston Celtic fans burning Isaiah Thomas’ jersey after he was unwillingly traded, this after he played through the grief of losing his sister for them. In fact, I could just point at Boston, really.
Online pop-culture fandom is wack, too; don’t be mistaken. I could explain why creating a stan account of a person who will never acknowledge your existence is goofy behavior. Furthermore, defending your champion celebrity from another’s stan accounts is the least fulfilling hobby I can think of. In short, I could talk about BTS fans, but getting doxxed wasn’t on my to-do list today.
If you take the worst traits of both sets of fans — a sports fan’s sense of justice and entitlement with a stan account’s blind devotion and anonymous militancy — you get the subject of my side-eye. It’s only right I critique the most repeated and ridiculous transgressions I’ve noticed on this particular side of the internet in the hopes I won’t feel guilty about belonging to it one day.
One infuriatingly recycled quote I see preface opinionated comments online is “as a ___ fan.” This preface is a curse to which sports fans online fall victim. It is simply impossible to give their thoughts on a subject without first stating their allegiances to sports organizations. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a comment under a New York Times article stating something along the lines of “As a Yankees fan, I think the repeated acts of aggression and violence toward the Ukrainian people by the Russian military are uncalled for.”
While that’s not real (I hope), those moments of stating fandom during an obvious tragedy in the sporting world irritate me so much. Earlier this year, we learned of young Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Dwayne Haskins’ unfortunate passing , a 25-year-old lost to a car accident. Looking at the replies to the announcement of this somber news, I found this trend made an appearance. One states, “Seahawks family sending love.” Another reads, “As a #Browns fan my heart goes out to #SteelersNation.”
I can’t villainize these comments, as they are innocently trying to pay their respects. Though, something comes off so ironically disrespectful when you frame your condolences in your team’s colors. No, you’re not upset even though you’re a Browns fan. You’re upset because a promising young man needlessly died. This event no longer has anything to do with sports and has everything to do with Haskins. It isn’t a ceasefire moment between fandoms; it’s a moment of grief.
Haskins’ death is not tragic despite your allegiance; it’s tragic because you’re human. You can have opinions outside of your team’s fanbase.
This impulsive dedication is partially a product of the natural competitiveness of sports; most of it is expected and a welcomed bit of the culture. Though online, it leads other fans to a sense of militancy and combativeness towards fans of other groups. Another trend I’ve noticed is a winning team’s fans immediately find the losing team’s final score announcement and bombard the comment section to boast. No, I’m not just upset that most of my teams aren’t good and this happens to them a lot.
Is it not strange how these particular fans feel the need to vanguard their organization to others? I was able to anonymously interview some owners of the hybrid sports stan accounts and ask them why they made the accounts in the first place.
“It made it easier to find news and opinions about my club if I made an account purely curated to the Red Wings,” said one Red Wings fan account. “Also to share my opinions to people that are more likely to want to hear them, like the pathetic play we usually partake in.”
In the perspective of this account, the idea of running a fan account is to build a web of other fans of the same team to create easy access to discussion of said team. It would then be pointless to seek out other fan accounts of different teams because that discussion wouldn’t be about the reason you created the account in the first place: your favorite team. Thus, my conclusion of why some fans actively seek confrontation with others is that they don’t have that community of friends they can talk to, have a lot of time on their hands and crave the attention of others.
I spotted one particular Liverpool F.C fan account that copied and pasted a tweet mocking Chelsea F.C fans and posted it in reply to 20 different tweets over the span of 24 hours, for a grand total of 11 interactions on all tweets like it. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with doing this, I just wonder how many jobs this account owner could have applied to in that same 24-hour period instead.
