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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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.
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 play sport near-daily but I don’t follow professional sports, and I honestly think ideally it should be abolished. It’s exploitative entertainment.
- Athletes often end up with horrible overwork injuries. I remember an interview where a range of former Olympians were asked “Was it worth it?” and the overwhelming answer was no, they now had life-long injury from training.
- Sport doesn’t need to be professional to be enjoyable to play and watch at a high-level.
- Like OP has said, it’s a business. They are parasocial and don’t care to truly involve you. They will platform advertisers who foster addiction, to make money. And I feel disgust every time I see a stadium absolutely covered with ads and uniforms covered in sponsorships. It might as well be a billboard with a patch of grass on it.
I’m obviously not against either sports or high-level competition, but as a profession? No way.
While many existing sports develop some useful life skills (physical skills, communication, decision making, strategy, … ) I have an interest in alternative games that emphasise these. Two of my favorites at the moment are Firefigher’s Olympics and Three-Sided Football.
I don’t follow pro sports, sometimes watch the college teams or the international gymnastics amateur competitions. Occasionally a soccer (football) match of our not top division but good local team but not often. Just not into watching men play games usually. But stuff like gymnastics and ice skating is so entertaining to watch. Competitive dance too.
There really isn’t any value past entertaining you, right? If it’s not entertaining you anymore, the value is gone.
Oh I guess I forgot rugby. I do not follow it at all but find it fun to watch. And the college used to put the basketball games on their TV channel with all the timeouts, halftime, everything taken out so it was just st gameplay and I always enjoyed those too. So sometimes I do like watching men play games if they are all action and not too long.
Sportsball.
So much wasted money and effort.
Play your games but stop acting like they’re the most important things on the planet.
I used to watch as much sport as I could find. Now I can’t find any unless I revert to paid, or questionable, streaming sites.
I started as a foundation member of my local A-League club and remained for over 12 years, my seat never changed, but they would classify my seat differently from silver to gold to platinum, this substantially increased the cost, now it’s not affordable.
I get far more enjoyment watching the 1st team of my son’s soccer club – it’s cheaper and I’m happy to volunteer my time around the club.
In other words your beloved teams are sucking…
Tickets and concessions have always been through the roof… like fast food it has always been expensive…
Pro sports have always had advertising on everything, nothing has changed.
Time???
I don’t I what to say to you… Al pro sports are better on time than they have ever been…
Gambling… who cares…
Pro sports don’t involve you… huh???
Watch and enjoy….
We’ve already see baseball start to respond to some of the problems you listed, but I see it continuing to be a major issue for most leagues as the teams have got caught up in the asset appreciation seen in other kinds of assets.
You should try following Sumo. Its -extremely- traditional, so the commercialism has a hard time sneaking in. Only the top two divisions are pro. There’s a major tournament starting today (Sunday 9th nov) for the next two weeks. You can easily catch replays on youtube.
Sumo has plenty of commercialism, it’s just a different kind. It’s a sport with large issues around gambling and alcohol for example, while being heavily sponsored by gambling and alcohol companies. I also believe that all divisions are pro, the top two divisions are just salaried pros. So all wrestlers win cash prizes when victorious, but the top two divisions also get a salary whether they win or lose. At least that’s how I’ve had it explained to me.
I’m with you. Professional sports have gone downhill. I used to be a diehard Denver Broncos fan. I had DirectTV specifically so I could get every NFL game. During football season, I’d watch every game I could. If I were to do that now, I’d need a number of different streaming services. Apart from that, I began watching less and less a few years ago when every other commercial, and every commentation, became about betting. Draft Kings, Fan Dual, MGM, and whatever else there was. It stopped being about watching the game and became more about gambling.
With baseball, they’re digitally putting ads on the pitcher’s mound. A couple years ago, they added advertising patches to the damn uniforms. It’s disgusting. People don’t play for a team anymore, they play for a brand.
Yet, even with all the additional ad revenue, ticket and concession prices have skyrocketed. It used to be that you could take a family of four to a game and not break the bank. Now, a single game is the cost of a full vacation. With four tickets, concession, and parking, you’re paying at least $500. And that’s without any sort of souvenirs. To make it worse, every team is wanting a new stadium and they are forcing the cities and states to pay for it through taxes. It’s greed on top of greed on top of greed.
I can’t stand watching professional sports anymore. On the plus side, I now have a lot more time to do other things that are a more fun and give a better sense of accomplishment than, “Hey, my team won.”
The new stadiums are another factor that really is ruining sports for me. In my city they are building a new one for the hockey team and it is mostly paid by taxes. So our property taxes are going to sky rocket to build this thing and then they will jack up the game ticket prices so we cannot even afford to go to games.
They sold it to the public as this was going to be a community building, which is such garbage. Am I going to be able to go down there when no games are happening and skate on the rink? Of course not
And heeeeere come your Doritos Locos Tacos Players!!
I’ve stopped caring about physical sports and their broadcast literal decades ago. I only occasionally watch relatively niche sports during the Olympics (climbing for example), but that’s it.
What I do watch is eSports. More exciting than watching a bunch of people run over a field repeatedly, trying to get a ball into a things or whatever.
Does anyone do like an esports ‘decathalon’? I think it’d be interesting.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Capitalism has a price and enshittification is the consequence.
