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Performative Fandom. In particularly the NYKNICKS floor seat celebrities. Most are like Taylor Swift - she’s a celebrity and clearly not a fan but she will get her floor seats because celebs go to big games especially when the big games are in NY or LA. It’s Timothee Chamalet who since I barely know this stuff so many here may not too is like a big Hollywood Act. At first I thought he was loud annoying Hollywood guy whose there because he did videos like this Courtside. Which to me looks like he’s performing for the camera. Turns out he’s an actual fan and won some contest for free tickets as a teenager tickets
Some reason this has been living in my head for a few days as a feeling that’s not how real fans celebrate. Perhaps theatre kids it’s so natural to perform that it’s how they celebrate. Where it’s more an internal joy. Something just doesn’t feel natural to me here.
The other thing is it’s the blackification of celebration. Where you need to do things loud and visually to show how much it means to you. Yes I am now the old man who yells at clouds.
The other interesting sports related thing is the bifurcation of the ticket market for sporting events. With the rise of television, growing wealth inequality, and the ease of air travel very big events have seen their ticket prices skyrockets. The interesting opposing side is a lack of pricing power in similar but slightly lower tier events. True events have ticket prices going to infinity (World Cup/NBA finals) far above the rate of inflation (wealth has grown much faster). Supply being inelastic means prices go up a lot. But we can build a lot of supply of second tier events. World Cup has added teams to the tournament so there are both more total games but realistically only the same amount of seats for the top teams playing and championship games. This has led to much higher prices on big WC games and empty stadiums for other games. The one example that really stood out to me was College Football Playoffs. Championship game tickets were a 3k minimum ticket price watching team 1 and 2 play each other. The semifinal game say watching teams 2 and 3 play you could scalp tickets for $30. People are going because they want to be at the game that will be an event not for the quality of football. Which ties into television because watching the game is just better on tv now.
The games that are in the public conscious as the “Event” have high prices. The Knicks final being in NYC pulls in global wealth. The NC College Football game pulls in all the money in our Northern Indiana province which is a fairly wealthy province. These are far more than just games - also networking opportunities and serve a coordinating function of getting an entire group of people to all be at the same place at the same time. For a Knicks level event if you buy tickets at 15k get-in price even the nosebleed seats will be hedge fund manager sitting next to some rich kid from third world country or minor celebrity. For IU NC College Football it’s some dude who owns a 20m a year car parts company sitting next to a HVAC roll-up guy. I think if I were in an Econ PHD you could write an interesting paper on the modern ticket pricing market and what it means for a game to be labeled the “Event” for a population group.
I guess you could also draw a parallel with the SF escorts charge $4k an hour to ticket pricing. People supposedly have less sex now, but when they are it costs more. It’s just more enjoyable to jerk off to a porn star than put in the work or pay to have sex with a 6.
The USA world cup match was also absolutely full of celebrities chanting 'USA! USA! USA!' after every goal(well, except for Paraguay's single goal). Sports brought America together that night; libtard celebrities were chanting with Marco Rubio and jeering the ref when he made pro-paraguay decisions. The rich and famous seemed less like an alien race and more like a bunch of regular guys living unusual lives.
Americans need better chants.
Embarassing.
Most American sports have a much faster cadence than soccer. Popular crowd activities from these sports don't port over easily.
That can't be right ? American sports are known to be stop and go.
Hockey is the only one with a faster cadence. And honestly, their fans have some pretty good chants. (Or at least my school did)
The debate is impossible.
Soccer fans claim the sport has more action because the ball is constantly in play. Non-soccer fans claim it is boring because there is little danger of anyone doing anything important for the vast majority of that time.
Soccer fans claim that baseball is boring because the ball is in play very little. Baseball fans feel it is exciting because every single pitch can result in a score.
Hockey and fight sports probably have the best balance of constant action with meaningful scoring at any second, but both are somewhat niche and require some degree of specialist knowledge to properly understand.
I know this isn't intrinsic to your point but it is something that bugs me about the Soccer discourse so I will rant.
Soccer players are constantly doing things that are dangerous and important to the outcome of the game, they are just less legible and it is a problem because the most popular American sports are focused on the score. Football is all about the points, big plays are exciting but ultimately considered subservient to scoring, individual points aren't as important in Basketball but it is a constantly scoring sport. Hockey is pretty similar to Soccer but I think Baseball is most instructive - it is also often a very low scoring game like Soccer. It has really intense non-scoring moments (like with Soccer) but at the end of the day outside of a few specific accomplishments Americans just focus on the score while watching and immediately tune out the non-scoring moments once the tension is released. Soccer is all about following the tempo, possessions, scoring chances, set pieces and so on. It requires much more attention and fan knowledge to notice quality play and actions that should be work "micro points" and because the numbers don't go up like we expect from our other stuff, it seems boring.
It can be not boring pricelessly because the numbers don't go up very often, but you have to pay attention to the whole scope of play. When you are used to chunked up Basketball and Football, well that's hard.
The score is the point. Keeping score is what separates a sporting event from a dance. To quote one of my favorite philosophical quotes about Soccer from Sampaoli:
All the stuff that isn't scoring fundamentally doesn't matter to the outcome of the game. Those actions that don't lead to scoring could have mattered, the omission of them might have mattered, but ultimately they didn't matter. They might matter inasmuch as they are part of a longer process which leads to actual scoring, but if they don't lead to anything then it didn't matter.
This is kinda silly. The average baseball scoreline is 4.5-4.5 basically forever, the average scoreline in the Big 5 UEFA leagues is 1.4-1.4. So baseball features three times the scoring of top flight soccer.
But anyway, my point isn't that soccer is boring, I quite like it, I intend to get quite drunk at the local brewery for as many of the USMNT games as possible. I want to cheer on our boy from Herhsey and a bunch of the most accidental Americans imaginable.
It's just that I think Soccer fans who talk shit on American sports are stupid and ignorant.
It's the same bullshit when soccer fans complain about commercial breaks in American sports, while buying soccer jerseys that are walking advertisements.
American football is well adapted to modern attention spans.
I think the key feature of this is the structure of first downs make for a very effective dopamine drip, every third play (2-3 minutes in real time) your team is either going to convert a first down, or fail to convert a first down, unless the game is already out of hand, you its a moment to either be happy or frustrated, there's some emotional payoff to the moment.
I have no doubt that various midfield actions in soccer and hockey (getting possession in the zone?) are similarly as important in terms of changing a team's win percentage, but those moments a less legible to the untrained eye (maybe that's what being able to appreciate a sport actually is?), for someone not all that familiar with the sport, it's easy to miss that a unit of win probability has been gained, or to not actually be able to distinguish whether what has just happened actually amounts to gaining a unit of win probability (as someone who doesn't watch that much soccer, my naive reaction to it is to think they should take more shots on goal, I think I've read enough about it know that's wrong though, what teams actually want to do is to work the possession more so that the shots they do take are higher probability).
Somewhat separately, American football is well suited to modern cell phone usage, there are games I put down the phone and actually pay attention, there are lots of game where I don't though (Sunday Night game between teams I don't have any special interest in). Football is the easiest game to follow while playing on your phone, the action happens in 5 minutes spurts, every play is replayed several times if you missed something, its easy to quickly check down and distance, if the team is in the red zone. In contrast, watching the US game Friday night, only two of the goals was I actually looking at the TV when they happened, replays are pretty quick because once the action starts up again you can't stop to show a replay. Great midfield actions that are like football first downs never get shown again because the action keeps going. So if you didn't appreciate it in real time, the TV isn't going to explain to you why you should appreciate it. The only non-scoring plays that get replayed are things that cause penalties or corners or free kicks.
No particular value judgement either way, I just think it's less adaptive to modern attention spans.
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Lol well I'm sure they are all shitting themselves over the hydration breaks.
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