How dare you gatekeep being a sports fan!
Girls are allowed to love sports too.
When I was a child, a Sunday morning started with a Formula 1 race on TV. The constant roar of the cars passing by and my father’s cheers for Michael Schumacher filled our living room. Michael Schumacher winning would result in a smile on my father’s face. Him losing meant we would have to live with Squidward for the rest of the day.
That was until football/soccer came on when he would cheer for BVB Dortmund to win against Schalke (Germans will understand the significance). If the BVB won, the smile would return or get even bigger. If they lost, Squidward would turn into the head coach to discuss his team’s disastrous choices on the field in great detail.
As a child I never understood how someone could be so invested in a team or a person they’ve never met. How their entire mood could shift because of a team winning or losing at a sport they themselves don’t even play.
I quickly learned that almost all fathers are this way. They are fans of a team ‘till death do us part’. A conversation over a beer always turns to sport at some point. League stats are discussed, trade decisions are criticized, and the upcoming game is constantly referred to as ‘a must-win for the team’.
Women never talked sports around me.
“Men like sports. That has always been like that”, was the only answer I got when I, a curious six-year-old, asked my mother. To her credit, she didn’t say that women can’t like sports — but it was implied. And the world around me really didn’t do a great job at convincing me otherwise.
Girls wanting to join the recently founded girl’s soccer team in our town would be mocked for their desire to play soccer, labeled all sorts of things not worth repeating. Girls being fans of a team would be called ‘too stupid to even understand the rules’. And all these years in which society treated team sports as this elusive men’s club hid the appeal of being a fan to the rest of us — girls.
We’ve come a long way since the weird half-open-minded, half-conservative times of the late 90s and early 2000s. Women playing sports isn’t new anymore. Still criticized by some, but we made it to prime time ladies! We will win them over eventually.
But with all this progress, the fear of being judged never left me. The boy’s laugh over a girl who couldn’t explain the offside rule to his satisfaction still haunts me. My father’s angry “WHAT?” when I dared to interrupt him during the soccer game still rings in my ears. It probably didn’t help that my hand-eye coordination leaves a lot to be desired and that I was constantly picked last for any team during gym class. The thinking that sport sucks just stuck with me.
Then the Olympics happened.
I’ve never really watched the Olympics before. I knew when they happened and how many medals Germany had won. I saw some summary clips on the news and maybe watched a few disciplines here and there. But it was more about keeping up with the zeitgeist, not me actively following the games.
This year was different. Maybe it was because the games were in Paris, close to home, that made me watch the games. Maybe it was because I had tons of work stress, was in a reading slump, or in desperate need of something to watch during my attempt to swear off social media altogether. I don’t know what made me watch the first time around, but I know why I kept watching and rooting for every German athlete I saw in disciplines I’d never even heard of before: it was fun.
Once the Olympic games ended, I was on the hunt for a new sport to watch. Team sports appealed the most to me, and one thing that has always bothered me to no end is that I am capable of understanding most team sports, with the exception of American Football.
You see, ball sports are usually quite simple: the ball needs to go into the opponent’s goal, whatever that goal looks like, a basket, a net, but the logic is really simple. American Football has that part too, but there is so much more to it. The fact alone that not the entire team is on the field at any given time confused the hell out of me. Living in a country that doesn’t do rugby, I was never confronted with anything like it, and whenever the Super Bowl came around it frustrated me that I, a smart women, couldn’t comprehend how the game works.
So, I started reading and learning, and soon my YouTube algorithm played along and a new obsession was born. I am now the proud subscriber to an NFL Game Pass, watch the Bengals play every week, listen to several pre- and post-game podcasts, analyze all the stats, and yes, my mood takes a turn when we practically hand over a win.
The smarts that it takes to analyze a football game in detail, understanding each play, each score, each stat — it is just what my data analyst-loving brain needs. I also love a bit of an underdog story. Not that the Bengals are one, especially not with the dream team that is Burrow and Chase, but despite making it to the Super Bowl three times, they’ve never actually won one. When looking for merch, I found a shirt with the words ‘we always almost win’, and watching this season, I gotta say this couldn’t be more true.
Turns out being a sports fan is fucking great.
Watching sports, any sport really, is fun for so many reasons, but mainly it is a way to escape reality without detaching from it completely. Streaming services (and social media) don’t have a beginning, middle, or end, they are bottomless pits of on-demand and unscheduled content. You alone decide when to start and stop watching, easily turning a quick break into a day-long Netflix marathon.
Sports events aren’t like that. They truly unfuck your attention span, as there is only one game a week (at least for the NFL when you follow one team). But regardless of how many games per week you watch, it is impossible to binge-watch the entire NFL season on a single lazy Sunday. You have to tune in week after week and adhere to a pre-determined schedule that you can’t change.
Sure, streaming makes it easy to watch a game a day or so after it happened, but it’s only half the fun. Everyone else watched the game live, they know the score and the big plays. I am the only one in my immediate circle of friends who watches the NFL, but watching a game after it happened still makes me feel left out. I am subscribed to many NFL newsletters and podcasts, so I’d have to go completely tech-free to stay in the dark about the final score. And the suspense of the live game, the not being able to fast forward to the end, that is where it is at.
Luckily, most games air on a Sunday evening my time, but believe me when I tell you that I am watching live from Germany at 2 am in the morning for the prime time games. Only once did I watch a game a day late, and it sucked.
Watching sports isn’t just entertaining it actually requires your brain to do some work. You are relaxing and learn new things at the same time. Depending on the sport, the rules can be more or less challenging, but you have to keep an eye on the ball (or puck, or whatever) at all times to truly follow the game. Watching sports isn’t just a stupid mind-numbing experience; sometimes it takes all your brainpower to understand why the coach would challenge that punt (I still don’t really understand why they did that) or why the refs did not see that facemask penalty (it was so unbelievably crystal clear I cannot believe they didn’t see that).
The sense of community is the third reason why being a sports fan is really fun. No matter whether you watch the game alone in your living room, with friends, or live at the stadium: millions of people watch it at the same time as you.
I am a true homebody and enjoy my own company, but that doesn’t mean I don’t long for community. While I have a real-life community where I live, sometimes it is hard to find people with the same interests as me. Sports events, especially team sports, are driven by community — online and off. People stream their watch parties and have live chats during the game, allowing me to connect with like-minded people from all across the world.
Being attached to reality and the sense of community that watching sports comes with has another positive aspect to it. One that has become more important in recent years. With AI evolving quicker than many other technologies before it, watching sports is the last frontier of real, unscripted entertainment. Some fans will sure have their things to say about the ‘unscripted’ part of my argument, but all we have to deal with in sports is some old-school cheating and maybe performance-enhancing substances. But we won’t have to deal with an AI-enhanced game — at least for now, who knows what big tech is cooking up.
And finally, the girliest of all the arguments why being a sports fan is really fun: the drama! Oh boy … I HAD NO IDEA! One team firing their head coach after a few shit games? A quarterback tearing his Achilles and the fans literally cheering as he is wheeled off the field because he played like shit? A thriller of a game where your team throws a hail mary at the last second and wins? I am a woman and I love gossip, so sue me. But how dare you gatekeep being a sports fan from us?
XOXO
Annika
The newsletters, podcasts, and people I follow:
The Sports Gossip Show: The name tells it all. Absolutely entertaining.
Impersonal Foul — If Bravo and ESPN had a baby, it would be Impersonal Foul. That tagline alone made me subscribe immediately.
**Mariah Rose on TikTok**, who perfectly ‘explains what is going on in the NFL world in a way the girls, the gays, and the theys (and the straight men who don’t wanna admit they don’t watch football) can actually understand.’
Cincinnati Bengals specific podcasts, but both are part of larger networks covering many other teams:
The Sick Podcast - Deep In The Stripes: ****My favorite Bengals podcast. A fired-up Elise Jesse is always putting the game into perspective.
Locked on Bengals: Another great podcast always keeping me up-to-date with the latest news, updates, and game analysis.
I moved to Melbourne, Australia, 14 years ago, and fandom is very different: it's almost a requirement to choose a team, and if the team you choose isn't the same as the person's team then you have to give a reason. My first impression was men and women seemed equally interested.
In the last few years, women's football (Australian Rules, soccer and rugby league) have clubs that are the same name and structure for men and women, unlike the NBA/WNBA in which the teams that were in the same city were just similar to each other.
It had to be the Bengals? Gross!
In all seriousness, as a male that grew up without a father in the picture with my mother and sister, I've always struggled some to interact with my fellow males. This is likely also the reason I didn't grow up watching sport either (other than my grandfather's first love, auto racing). I've always thought sports could use more of the female perspective. Not only because I personally have always had an easier time interacting with females, but also because of the real reason I loved reading this article so much.
Females tend to be less reluctant to admit that the appeal is the drama. This is absolutely correct. Sports ARE the drama they create, either between the humans who are watching, between the humans who are playing, or between the humans talking about the humans playing. I started a whole Substack publication that's (basically) all about NFL drama, meaning it's obviously damn appealing to me. Nothing is better for escapism than falling into a good story, and the NFL allows us to do that every week. I enjoy this scarcity, because there's only so much escapism I need in my life, but even if you'd like some more, there are sports every day of the week in North America.
The sense of community in sport is interesting in that it's almost optional. If you want to hide in a basement watching the games, admitting to nobody that you're a fan of the Jacksonville Jaguars (which pre-Substack was my NFL experience), that's an option. If you'd like to be a sports gambler, insulating yourself from the community by individualizing your goals (everybody cheers when a touchdown is scored, but only you cheer when you hit a four-way parlay), you can do that, but you can also do things like this, engaging with fellow fans basically any time you'd like.
In all, as somebody who also did not come out of the womb as a sport fan (other than auto racing), I agree that this sport fan thing is pretty fantastic.