Sports Loyalty and the Global Community
People have come from miles around, decked in either red or blue, clinking glasses of beer in every color from amber to black, talking trash and singing songs…as well as eating breakfast. This is the scene at the Londoner in Dallas nearly every Saturday and Sunday morning, sometimes as early as 6:45 am. Fans of English Premier League soccer gather all over the world to cheer on their teams, regardless of whether they’ve seen the team play live or traveled to the team’s home city. As I take my seat, I’m decked out in Liverpool red with three of my friends (along with one in opposing Chelsea blue) and the waitress comes by with a breakfast menu—all English-style items: Guinness stew, fish and chips, English fry-up, or the simple open-face bacon and egg sandwich. I go with the bacon sandwich, the only reminder of how early it is. The lights are dimmed and the televisions are bright, further simulating the environment that our English counterparts are experiencing at the same moment. Luckily for us, 10:00 am is when the beer starts flowing, in accordance with state rules, of course. So we order everything from Guinness to Newcastle, just as our brethren in pubs all over England are doing at the same time. Throughout the dimly lit bar, Liverpool and Chelsea fans begin to speculate and insult, sing and curse, as the teams come out of the dressing rooms thousands of miles away. After our orders have been placed, a huge man from Zimbabwe named Taz, comes over and starts greeting those in red, acknowledging my friend Alex, a Chelsea fan, with a simple, “You suck.”
The world today has become closer than ever, and sports are one of the most passionate displays of unity between cultures. Sports communities are formed online that are comprised of people in hundreds of countries, something that is unprecedented and only possible because of technology. Since the beginning of professional sports, communities have attached to their local team because it brings them all together to be entertained and take pride in their hometown. Liverpool, for example, is historically a blue-collar seaport that used to be one of the poorest cities in England—until the 1980s, the only fans of the club were those from nearby whose families had been fans since the late nineteenth century.
Sports fans today have access to people and events all over the globe through online video and photo-sharing, and the explosion of social networking has created the largest community on the planet. This is important because we are not only getting the facts about what is happening all over the world, we are getting millions of first-hand accounts and opinions of these events. Fans of English Premier League clubs hail from all over the world, from Fort Worth, Texas to Hong Kong; the bond of sporting loyalty crosses cultural and social barriers. Fans can access live Twitter feeds from journalists, players, and other fans about what is happening with their team—many even translate these news tidbits for fans that speak other languages, a symbol of how much the sports community means to individual fans. Franklin Foer, in his book How Soccer Explains the World, refers to a New York Times column in which Thomas Friedman hails “the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.” Foer wants to communicate that because cultural lines are dissolving, sports cultures are bleeding into others all over the world.
However, many fans are still stuck in the traditional sports loyalty system, but show signs of a growing curiosity to expand their horizons. Stephen Buechner, recent graduate of the University of Colorado, has a fierce loyalty for all of his hometown teams; his only other sporting loyalties are because of familial ties—he cheers on the TCU Horned Frogs, for example, because his sister is a student at the university. “The [Denver] Broncos have always been my favorite professional football team for as long as I remember, likely because the Broncos are my Dad's favorite team,” he explains. His loyalties extend to the main professional sports, from the Denver Nuggets NBA team to the Rockies baseball club. In addition to these professional sports, whose stadiums and arenas are all within an hours drive from his childhood home, Stephen cheers on the CU Buffs, because they are his alma mater. “I religiously follow the Buffs football team, through recruiting in the offseason, the spring football game, and definitely during the season.” Stephen is the typical American sports fan, cheering for all of his local teams with a fierce passion--both attending as many games as is fiscally reasonable, and watching the rest on television whenever possible. Stephen’s experiences as a sports fan are family-related; the earliest experiences that shaped his loyalties are because of going to games with his dad. Today, teens have the ability to connect with people all over the world, which presents completely new ways for them to rebel and break away from the traditions of their parents.
The fans that gather at the Londoner with religious ferocity are of a different sporting stock; their passion is not for a team a few miles down the road, but a few thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean. These fans choose their teams because of a variety of personal reasons that are not always as logical as that of location and family ties. With growing globalization comes a growing desire to break out of the normal sports loyalty world. Alex Nguyen, the Chelsea fan stuck in a sea of Liverpool fans at the Londoner, took a fairly unusual route in choosing his choice Premier League club. “I’m a fan because I wanted to support English soccer, but didn’t want to choose the same team as someone I knew, so Liverpool and Manchester City were out. Plus they wear blue, my favorite color, and were a London team I could support—Arsenal and Manchester United are certified as bandwagon teams, so they were out.” In other sports, Alex is a fan of teams from his hometown of Dallas, from the Texas Rangers baseball club to the Dallas Stars hockey franchise. “The Stars were my first sports love. My favorite memory was when they won the Stanley Cup in 1999,” said Alex. After watching with friends and doing some research, Alex slowly developed an interest in soccer and was instantly drawn to the intensity and passion in the English Premier League, so he knew he needed to find a team. When asked why he opted not to go with his own personal trend and support local Major League Soccer team, FC Dallas, Alex simply shrugged and said that “MLS is boring. It’s not world class by any means, so the entertainment value is significantly higher with leagues like the EPL.” Once Alex had decided on Chelsea Football Club, a London club that has slowly garnered success in recent years, he jumped into the world of being a soccer fan with fierce enthusiasm.
As the morning at the Londoner went on, the highs and lows of being a soccer fan were experienced by fans of both red and blue. In one room of the English pub, there were fans singing their hearts out about Chelsea, with those in another room yelling curses back to the singing horde. Due to a recent defection of a Liverpool player to Chelsea, the tension managed to heat up all the way in Dallas, and even an outsider could feel electricity in the room. As Raul Meireles, Liverpool’s Portuguese midfielder, scored the only goal of the game, the room erupted in cheers and shouts for joy—with a few obvious undertones of angry cursing. Brett Musslewhite, Liverpool fan for the last four years, had few words other than, “this is one of the greatest parts of being a fan—those few moments of sheer joy after what seems like an eternity of chances and close calls.” When asked why he became a Liverpool fan, Brett could only speculate, “it just felt right. Watching the players spurred me to look up information online, and once I discovered the rich history and fanbase that the team has it was like falling in love.” This is what draws fans to sports teams all over the world—an unexplainable passion that millions experience. Soccer is an especially intense sport; if your team scores in the ninetieth minute, the eighty-nine stressful minutes you just experienced fade away and are replaced with a feeling of complete and overwhelming emotion. The rare spontaneity of soccer goals only increases the sudden impact of joy for fans; every moment is building up to something, so when the tension culminates in a goal, the emotional release can be explosive.
This match at the Londoner happened to be on the same day as the Super Bowl, another obvious sporting powerhouse among TV ratings. The Liverpool/Chelsea game drew around 418,000 viewers (according to Nielsen Media Research), which is not nearly as much as the Super Bowl, but it was nevertheless a record breaker for Fox Soccer Channel, the only English language soccer channel in the United States. Even ESPN has started to draw in soccer fans with their extensive World Cup 2010 coverage, as well as a solid amount of games from not only the English Premier League, but also the Spanish La Liga and German Bundesliga. The Chelsea/Arsenal match on ESPN2 on December 27, 2010 drew around 610,000 viewers, a record breaker for Premier League games in the US (stats from Nielsen Media Research). Many of these matches are shown at times when the average American is either sleeping or working. However, thousands of Americans are hooked and force themselves to wake up early or pull up an internet stream in the corner of their screen. Fans continue to ask ESPN to show more matches, and Fox Soccer Channel garners more subscribers every year.
When asked what other teams Brett was a fan of, his main answers were, “TCU because I’m a student, obviously, and the Boston Red Sox.” Interestingly, the Liverpool Football Club was recently bought by Fenway Sports Group, owners of the Boston Red Sox. “What’s awesome is that it ties these two excellent teams together from thousands of miles away, and [Liverpool] are starting to adhere to the methods that brought the Red Sox their first World Series wins after an 86-year drought.” This is the perfect model of how globalization is starting to affect the world of sports--fans are active in their search for a team that they connect with, despite locality or tradition. When Alex went about choosing a team, he skipped over the obvious teams and went with Chelsea, a successful team that has flown under the radar for most American fans. On the other hand, new fans of Liverpool would only know of their successes by flipping through history books; they have had meager successes in the past twenty years, their glory days being in the seventies and eighties. Brett was quick to admit this, but he explains that the community he has become a part of means more to him than trophies. “Because of Twitter, Facebook, and forums, I have connected with fans all over the world—some right down the street from Anfield (Liverpool’s stadium) and some in countries I know nothing about, like Malawi and Malta. We can all talk about Liverpool as if we were friends sitting down at a pub after going to a match, but we are just typing on our computers thousands of miles away from each other.” This shared passion provides an strong community, even if some members are thousands of miles away.
As the early morning match starts to die down, the victorious Liverpool fans wear smug smiles above their red jerseys as they finish their beer, take a last bite of bacon, pay the check, and walk out into the bright noon sunlight, ready to start the day. Brett and Alex are friends again, talking about stopping by a nice bakery on the way out of Dallas. These two sports fans have taken very different paths to their sports loyalties, from the simple preference of the color blue to a deeper connection with a worldwide community. But they are both part of a growing trend all over the world—sports fans whose loyalty is no longer limited to location or tradition. Once sports fans have discovered their teams, the passion sets in and they are stuck for life, following these multi-million dollar athletes through the valleys of tough losses and the elation of winning titles. Alex states, “Once I’m a fan, I support my teams for life, through thick and thin.” This is what sports loyalty is all about, a lifelong love affair that costs thousands of dollars, countless brain cells, and more broken hearts than all the poets in the world could describe.