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 quit watching all sports, cold turkey, four years ago and haven’t looked back. I feel so much better now and have more free time.
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 hate how gambling is everywhere so I refuse to put money into it but I still watch football every sunday.
Our struggle has been the enshittifcation of streaming the games. We don’t live in the market of our hockey team we like to watch. In order to actually get (legally) 95% of the games we would need to subscribe to about 5 different services and still be blacked out for the games against the “local” team, which is 4 hours away from us, unless we also pay for cable/satellite television as well. We used to legitimately pay for the service that the NHL offered where we could get just our team, or all of the games, for one season price. Then they split everything to all the different networks so now we’d need sling, TNT, espn+ (and the highest tier of it), nhl network, prime, Apple TV +, and a cable subscription
And that’s why sites exist where you can stream all the games, regardless of location and blackouts… and they don’t cost a dime!
Which we do. But it’s not our first choice
Yeah, I’ll catch games OTA when they’re available, but I’m not paying for any additional streaming services just to pick up my team’s games, because of all the absurdity you mentioned in your previous post. If I care enough to watch, I’ll just find a free stream and keep the Adblock on.
I’ve never understood why they don’t have a “shut up and take my money” service. Fine they have their contracts, but they have die-hard fans who would love to give them money to watch their teams in one place. Give credit to paramount, fox, whoever, just get it to your customers. They’re doing them a disservice and missing out on money
Right. They could basically name their price. We want to do stuff the “right” way. There’s just no way.
Doing things the “wrong” way is overwhelmingly about service issues, not money issues. I came across the same issues where I live, and decided to take up “sailing” instead.
Same way I’ve always felt about professional sports. Do what you want, have fun, but you’re taking a game way too seriously.
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
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
I understand the need for entertainment. I just think the current value of watching live sports is little to none. In the NFL’s case, why would you buy a cable subscription to watch a program that’s only 11% the actual game I want to watch(source: trust me bro). That’s like asking if someone would want to watch a show that’s 90% filler.
You haven’t needed a cable subscription to watch the NFL in over a decade.
How do people do it nowadays?
DirectTV streaming app,
NFL Sunday Ticket
ESPN+
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.
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.
There is so much money involved. I would almost say that there is too much money involved to leave the results up to the athletes.
How much corruption is there that never gets publicized or even discovered?
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.
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.
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
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.
