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.
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I find the amount of gambling present outright obscene
I feel the same about sports as I have my whole life … worthless waste of time and money.
The PWHL (as viewed in the states) so far has been very refreshing since you can just watch on youtube with the only real advertising being specific sponsored elements (power plays are sponsored, maybe something else too?), and the stuff on the boards— which they don’t (as best as I can remember) digitally animate and change all the time during the game, any ad breaks on the US youtube broadcast just get a “we’ll be right back” screen and/or a few team “ads”
I hate how gambling is everywhere so I refuse to put money into it but I still watch football every sunday.
If they aren’t all fixed. They are just being used to promote gambling at this point. And I’m not going to the stadium to pay $50 for parking and then $20 for a drink. Plus in a closed system like the nfl, losing doesn’t actually mean anything. You can have 0 wins and as long as someone is making money, no one cares.
I can’t even figure out how to buy access to watch Formula 1, the F1 website offers me to buy live time track, which I don’t want, maybe it’s because of my region or something. I can probably research this more and find out, but the point is just have a huge button that says WATCH HERE, make it easy, it’s so much easier to watch “somewhere” else
That’s why we Germans own our clubs so we can vote against many of the things you described above.
I normally watch some motorsports and things haven’t been too bad. I’ve loved watching F1 but I don’t want to sign up for AppleTV just to watch next year. I haven’t decided if I’m going to bother watching on pirate sites or just remove it from the list of motorsports I follow.
I do watch the occasional ball sports game with my dad, or a hockey game with my wife if she wants to, and oh my god the ads ads ads. They’re constant and it’s unbearable. Especially all the gambling ads, it makes me have a pit in my stomach thinking about all the money they’re taking from people by preying on addicts.
I don’t follow pro sport at all. Only the formula 1, and only through articles on news sites.
I just don’t care. It’s not affecting my life.
I also find it hard to stay fan of a team, when the players constantly switch to other clubs. If the people are constantly changing, how can a club stand for anything?
This week players are all about how this club is their favourite, next week they get a transfer and suddenly that club is a better fit. …
Yeah the last sport I was really into anymore was basketball, but over the last few years the NBA has been doing everything in their power to get me to stop watching. They really succeeded too because I can’t watch it anymore.
The public wearing of nice jerseys has really fallen off. I live in a diverse city and in the decades of the past one seem jerseys from various sports and teams worn here. It’s a very rare occasion to see more than a ball cap or beanie with a team on it now. Might be my perception of it all too, though.
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?
For me I stopped watching sports because it was impossible to stream it for a fair price. They won the piracy fight against me personally so now I just don’t watch at all.
The gambling is really concerning for me, if I have kids I want them to play sports for the exercise, but I think the downsides of all the gambling almost out weigh that at this point. It’s crazy that sports aren’t family friendly anymore.
Its extremely easy to stream it
I find it really inconvenient compared to just adding a movie to radarr.
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.
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.
