Towards a New Fandom
The sports-industrial complex has made sports worse for fans. Craig Calcaterra explores these problems and suggests a path forward.
Review by Josh Alexakos
My sports fandom began, like most folks lucky enough to be born in New England, with a team called the Patriots. I was spoiled rotten by that experience, and it hooked me on sports immediately. Almost twenty years later, I follow three teams in three different sports with unceasing and irrational devotion.
Yet in the last decade, I have become increasingly aware of the ugly nature of the business of sports. I was therefore intrigued to read Craig Calcaterra’s book, Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game. The book calls for sports fans to rethink their approach to the ways in which they support, follow, and participate in what Calcaterra calls the “sports-industrial complex.” It does so in two moves: first, considering the problem at hand by surveying the multifaceted nature of the sports-industrial complex and how it leverages fan loyalty to its own financial and cultural benefit; and second, outlining some approaches to how fans can individually resist the temptations of the complex and think critically about the game(s) they love.
Calcaterra does not approach these problems from a neutral perspective. He became a sports fan at a young age and later a professional sportswriter, covering baseball for most of his career. This lends him a credibility that writers outside fandom lack. Calcaterra is aware of and aims to respect the experience of being a fan—insisting often that we need not abandon our fandom to fight back, nor should we.
He is not an unthinking fan, though. Calcaterra is intimately aware of the ways in which the complex works to its own benefit, often to the detriment of local communities, athletes’ well-being, and even fans themselves. His assessment (the core of the book’s first part) can feel overwhelming, but I found this necessary; the reality of the industry must be confronted for what it is. Calcaterra avoids the temptation to skim over the problems, instead choosing to explore them in brilliant depth.
Unfortunately, the strength of the book’s first part leaves the second, where Calcaterra imagines a way forward, feeling light and insufficient. Perhaps that is to be expected: Calcaterra never promises sure-fire solutions to the malaise of the sports-industrial complex. Yet, I finished the book feeling confused and unsatisfied. I think there are two key reasons for this.
Sports fandom can be instructive for life, precisely through the development of the loyalty that Calcaterra sees as a liability.
The first is the book’s focus on the American sports context. Beyond outsized attention to the specific workings of the American sports-industrial complex, American individualism seeps through the essential question Calcaterra asks: “What can I, as an individual fan, do to push back against the machine?” This limited approach makes for proposed solutions that I found insufficient to the challenges posed. I suspect more research into global sports fandom may have generated other ideas. The ways in which fans in other countries have leveraged collective action to push back against industry actors are provocative, but Calcaterra neglects to consider them seriously.
One such example that he dismisses too quickly is the demise of The European Super League, an effort by the most powerful European soccer clubs to break away from their leagues to form a separate league. This big swing went from inevitable to dead in the water in the span of two days. Why? A host of factors, but some credit goes to fan backlash, whose role Calcaterra under-examines. For example, two historic German clubs, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, are governed by the “50+1 Rule,” which means that their fans have the tie-breaking vote for club decisions. Fans exercised this power when the Super League proposal was brought to the clubs; as a result, the clubs rejected the proposal. Elsewhere, Liverpool FC, an English club, created a supporters’ board after significant pushback from an organized fan group. This board is now written into the club’s founding documents, and has a say in significant decisions going forward.
Of course, it is possible that these examples of collective fan action are unworkable in an American context. But sometimes radical solutions outside our immediate frame of reference are required to solve deep problems.
The second reason that some of Calcaterra’s proposed solutions feel confusing is that he does not spend time reflecting on the question hanging over the whole enterprise: what are sports for? This question may be impossible to answer, but it must be asked before one can proceed to ask what it means to be a fan, and what solutions fans can meaningfully pursue.
This gap is clear when Calcaterra reveals one of his suggested courses of action: becoming a “fair-weathered fan.” He argues that switching loyalties when a team is not doing well removes the hold that owners are able to leverage over fans. Without that loyalty, owners cannot use the team as a vehicle to push their agendas, taking a powerful card out of their deck. This suggestion does, as Calcaterra admits, fly “in the face of just about everything every sports fan has been taught their entire lives.” That does not mean it doesn’t deserve a hearing–but my own reflections on sports fandom, and what value it has, lead me to reject this path.
Sports fandom can be instructive for life, precisely through the development of the loyalty that Calcaterra sees as a liability. While one’s team allegiance may be arbitrary, the love and loyalty it engenders is no less real for it. Maintaining this loyalty through good and bad times helps develop muscles crucial for enduring other difficult circumstances in life.
To say that sports can help us develop this virtue may seem absurd. But sports are one of the few places where this virtue is developed in our society, particularly earlier in life. In our cultural moment, we have significant freedom to “opt-out” of things—a book club, a friend group, a dating relationship. While this option is not inherently bad, it has become the default recourse for many, and we are worse off for it. We have not developed the capacity to endure through hardship and pain. It makes us more miserable, as deeper joys are often found through enduring setbacks. Because of this, Calcaterra’s solution strikes me as misguided in these times.
These critiques should not drive interested readers away from the book. Rethinking Fandom is a worthwhile place to start this conversation, and Calcaterra deserves great credit for making such a valuable contribution. While I still find myself unconvinced by some of his solutions, I think his analysis is dead on. The sports-industrial complex has created a quagmire, especially in the United States. If change is to occur, we must grasp the enormity of the problem at hand.
And yet, sports fans are irrationally optimistic. With the beginning of each new season, despite all the obvious signs that my team is not going to have a good year, I catch myself imagining them hoisting a trophy in just a few months. And it almost never happens. In the same way, the sports fan who endeavors to confront the complex will always have to accept the high likelihood of failure. But our nature and training as fans may also give us the resources to persist in the face of certain defeat. And, as has been proven time and again, relentless hope is the one thing the sports-industrial complex cannot defeat.
Josh Alexakos lives and works in San Francisco, CA, as a software engineer. He enjoys reading a wide variety of books, exploring the Bay Area and its numerous food options, and stressing about his favorite sports teams.
Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game was published by Belt Publishing on April 5, 2022. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
