I have been a big sports fan all my life, but I feel myself withdrawing HARD from pro sports this year.
Main culprits for me:
- The gross enshitification of being a sports fan.
Ticket and concession prices are though the roof. It requires multiple subscriptions to follow your team.
Worst one is fan merchandise which has completely turned to shit. When Fanatics bought the rights to every leagues jerseys, the quality completely fell off. I used to be able to buy a stitched premium jersey for $150. Now they want you to spend close to $300 and everything is screen printed. I have not bought a new jersey in 5 years.
- Advertising on everything.
It used to be that you would put up with what I considered a fair amount of advertising. 5 min commercial breaks after like 20-30 mins of gameplay.
Today though the commercial breaks are not good enough for these leagues. Now they are on the screen always. Patches on jerseys and helmets. Digitally inserted on the field/court.
Worst offenders are the NHL who now have their boards on the rink covered in digitally inserted advertising on their broadcasts. It would be one thing if they just changed ads every once in a while, but they make those things dance around and are insanely distracting. I consider the NHL basically unwatchable because of those stupid fake boards. It is funny to me when they show highlights and you see the real boards with simple advertising and I basically long for those again.
I also used to be a fan of NFL Redzone for alot of years. Not anymore though and if you have watched it lately then you understand why. They always billed themselves as “7 hours of commercial free sports,” but over the years they started to really test what that meant. They didn’t take proper commercial breaks, but suddenly sponsored segments were everywhere on the screen and they would pop up these ads on the edge of the screen and reduce the broadcast to a small box. This season they are showing full commercials now and are not even pretentending to be commercial free anymore. What I found most interesting about this situation though was the fans who basically ridiculed other fans for complaining about the commercials by saying that they should not have expected it to last forever. Which shows how conditioned fans are to expect rampant advertising in sports.
- The time suck
So many sports games takes 3-4 hours to play. If you are going to follow all your teams games, then that is 100’s of hours a season spent watching other people play a game. If you follow multiple teams then we are probably easily encroaching on thousands of hours. We have not even included the hours people spend watching analysis or “hot takes”
If I feel I have to catch up on a game, I can go on YouTube and watch a highlight of the game. The amount of times a 5 hour baseball game has a highlight video the lasts 5 mins really speaks volumes to me.
- Gambling
Probably the biggest factor that has eroded sports. It started with fantasy football forever ago, but now we see people literally throwing their lives away for parlays. Then seeing pregame shows where they are talking about the over/under of the game.
Sports leagues used to fight gambling to preserve their leagues integrity. Now they support gambling hard, but act shocked and dismayed when their players get corrupted.
- Pro sports don’t involve you
More of a personal realization than anything, as much as you can dedicate yourself to a team and be a diehard fan, these teams don’t care about you and never will. They are happy to sell you things stamped with their logo and claim that they will always chase championships, but ultimately they care about profit and themselves. They don’t act in the best interest of fans no matter how much they try to convince you otherwise.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for me and I could list examples all day. I think ultimately I am realizing that I need to reevaluate my relationship with sports and not make it such a priority in my life.
You must log in or # to comment.
I want you to do a little thought experiment with me…
Sports make a shit ton of money. They have advertisements crammed anywhere they can. When you go to a stadium, the shots of crowds are almost always pre-recorded, or actors, so they can package the emotions they want to convey without risking a genuine moment from genuine fans not going exactly how they want it to.
They gouge you with ticket prices, they gouge you with food/drink prices, the gouge you for parking. If you’re watching at home, you have to subscribe to their specific streaming platform, and even then it doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to see the game they want.
They recruit kids in high school and college and use them knowing full well that less than 1% will have anything resembling success. They spend millions upon millions exploiting these kids.
They give quasi-legal performance enhancing drugs to their athletes. Ones that are labeled as supplements and aren’t technically against the rules, but do the exact same thing.
They hide studies that say their sport causes long-term injuries. They bribe local officials to get huge tax breaks on building new stadiums. They have teams of lawyers and PR personnel to cover up all but the most extreme controversies from their players. They have people working night and day to find new ways to keep people’s attention and have them consume more. They found a way to make gambling legal again and have been pushing HARD for it.
Now I want you to look at all these underhanded and slimy tactics they use, and really ask yourself: “Are the games themselves rigged?”. If your immediate answer is “No, of course not! They would never mess with the integrity of the game itself!” why do you feel that way? Why do you trust organizations, that have shown they hold nothing sacred if it means more money, to NOT mess with the game itself? You know they would if they could get away with it; and with the state of the world today, do you really think they COULDN’T get away with it?
Mostly that gridiron football is a public health crisis and should be treated as such
I feel like following a specific sports team feels like a full time job now. You can’t just watch the games live, you have to follow all the players on social media, watch for trade rumors, following the pre and post seasons, know all players names and play fantasy sports. I used to like to casually watch most of the local teams play but the expectations around being a fan is too high. Since I am male it is assumed that this is my whole life and hobby when really I don’t care that much. Now, I only want to watch a game with my friends as an excuse to hang out. It feels not worth the effort because there is too much content and you need to consume it all to engage with it. Makes me want to opt out
You hit the nail on the head. The enshittification is real.
I’m a diehard Astros fan. Game tickets are still pretty affordable but everything else is expensive af. When I was living in Austin where Astros games weren’t really syndicated on TV, I still couldn’t watch them even if I subscribed to MLB.TV because I was in their blackout area. They make it a pain in the ass to even watch games and then they wonder why MLB attendance is down.
I’m still a big fan of all my teams but I really only casually follow sports at this time. You can still be a sports fan while not taking it super seriously.
I followed futbol 𖦹°ᯓ⚽ ( european leagues and international tounaments mostly), for close to 15 years. (Mid 2000’s till the pandemic)
The biggest ones for me were:
Time sink.- Games are long, I get restless now. Also, too many hours a week spent watching tv.
Keeping track of too much info- It stopped being fun when I had no one esle to discuss it with in a casual way.
I’ve always pirated futbol so ease of access was never an issue for me, but looking for sources is also kind of a chore.
Social media.- there’s always been big scandals in sports, but now we get to know too much about the players / others themselves: this guy is a racist, this one a wife beater, or a rapist, etc. (and look, no consequences!). It was easier back then to just focus on the games. I find it hard to enjoy a match when I know the quality some of the people involved.
There’s also the corruption, the lack of ethics (like Qatar building the world cup infrastructure with slave labor)… Sigh
When the world cup was on, I used to sit through all the games I could, even had them on the background while at work. Now, I’m not really excited for next one, even though it’s the last thing that I still followed.
I might watch some games, but I don’t feel passionate about the sport any more.
Good summary. Agree. The only time I enjoy sports now is watching my kids play. For me, seeing adults take sports seriously is a bit like meeting adults who still believe in Santa Claus.
Love sports. All the sports I watch are currently on the one service. Occasionally I’ll go to a game but prefer the lounge room stadium.
I’ve moved workplace in the last few years and having sport to talk about made it so much easier socially.
I do wish the gambling ads would fuck right off though.
It’s all bought and paid for. Nothing much left for the masses unless they pay a fee.
It is not possible for me to care less about sports. I maybe gave half a shit here and there over the years, but now the world burns. Sports are just overpriced bread and circuses.
Jays fan, so it was an interesting year. quite the finish, very entertaining
but holy fuck do I ever hate SportsNet for having such a shitty fucking streaming service. and jesus fucking christ the gambling ads.
I doubt I’ll pay them next year - I only did this year because of how well the Jays were doing at the end of the year. last year I canceled mid year I think because I was sick of how shitty their fucking app was. also, what happened to the 2 minute 5 minute and 10 minute recaps? that shit was great, perfect for sitting down to eat breakfast or lunch and catch up on last night’s game. I fucking loved those things in 2024 but this year they just didn’t do it or something.
It all went wrong when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016. The Curse was there for a reason and breaking it shifted us into an unstable configuration of possibility space. More and more unlikely and incomprehensible things will keep happening unless the timeline is corrected. I’m not saying we need to rewrite history… but I’m not saying it’s not worth a try, either.
It used to be that they’d put baseball games on broadcast TV.
Now you basically need a subscription to watch the team in my area. It’s like they don’t want anyone to see the games.
My team is the Padres, but I live in the Midwest. I’d have to buy a subscription to the MLB app just to watch them, but I’m such a casual fan that I don’t care enough even though I do find them fun to watch.
If you have T-Mobile they usually give away free MLB tv for the regular season each year. Since you don’t live where your team is you’ll actually be able to watch them since you aren’t blacked out. No post season ofc though.
Sportsball.
So much wasted money and effort.
Play your games but stop acting like they’re the most important things on the planet.
Before every game: A SHOWDOWN FOR THE AGES, TWO TEAMS ENTER, WHO WILL WIN, WITNESS HISTORY AS THESE TWO LEGENDARY TEAMS BATTLE IT OUT IN THE GAME OF THE CENTURY
I play sport near-daily but I don’t follow professional sports, and I honestly think ideally it should be abolished. It’s exploitative entertainment.
- Athletes often end up with horrible overwork injuries. I remember an interview where a range of former Olympians were asked “Was it worth it?” and the overwhelming answer was no, they now had life-long injury from training.
- Sport doesn’t need to be professional to be enjoyable to play and watch at a high-level.
- Like OP has said, it’s a business. They are parasocial and don’t care to truly involve you. They will platform advertisers who foster addiction, to make money. And I feel disgust every time I see a stadium absolutely covered with ads and uniforms covered in sponsorships. It might as well be a billboard with a patch of grass on it.
I’m obviously not against either sports or high-level competition, but as a profession? No way.
While many existing sports develop some useful life skills (physical skills, communication, decision making, strategy, … ) I have an interest in alternative games that emphasise these. Two of my favorites at the moment are Firefigher’s Olympics and Three-Sided Football.
Capitalism has a price and enshittification is the consequence.
