What About Sports Makes It Special?

 Fan loyalty is the loyalty felt and expressed by a fan towards the object of his/her fanaticism.

Allegiances can be strong or weak. The loyalties of sports fans have been studied by psychologists, who have determined several factors that create such loyalties. Fan loyalty can be threatened by team actions.

People talk about the athleticism and artistry, and that’s part of it.

But it’s not all of it. If it were, the ballet would have multibillion-dollar TV deals.

Then there’s the way it mimics life, with struggle and uncertainty. That’s definitely a key. Sports are fantastic because they mimic life (hard work pays off! everyone has to deal with loss!) but not too much. In real life, it’s very often unclear who won and who lost, who’s good and who’s bad, even when the contest stops and starts — and the rules are only sometimes enforced. In sports, they have uniforms and referees and strict rules to tell us all that. It’s life, but more tidy.

I also have a homespun theory about war. A good chunk of natural selection through history has, gruesomely, come via war, where presumably those of us with the more militaristic-minded have fared better, and reproduced more. With every war the DNA for those good at war has had a little advantage. In other words, for a lot of us, probably, some part of our brains is wired for the adrenaline of battle.