September 24, 2024 • 29 mins
Sports fans experience incredible highs and lows, and spend loads of money on a product over which they have no control. But for a long time, no one bothered to study the minds or impulses of fans. Michael Lewis finds out how that's changing as writers and academics learn more about the powerful psychology of fandom. Just in time for technology to exploit fandom more than ever.
For further reading:
Eric Simons’ book The Secret Lives of Sports Fans
Research by Murray State University psychology professor Daniel Wann on fandom: https://murraystate.academia.edu/DanielWann
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
You know, I went to a game with my dad
and my brother and it was miserable and awful, and
we're all frustrated and mad.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Eric Simon's high school math teacher in northern California. Typical
sports fan in some ways. He fell in love with
his favorite teams as a little kid after his dad
took him to some games. Now he's all grown up
but still going to games.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'm riding home. I'm taking bart back across from Berkeley
into the city on a Saturday night, and I'm sitting
there and I have like a headache from wearing a
dumb hat that is like constricted my head for too long,
and I've been standing in the sun, and i had
like a miserable dinner, and there's all these people around
me riding bart in for like a nice night. They're
dressed up, they're going to bars, they're going to nice restaurants.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
But in one way, Eric was not typical. He was
starting to ask questions that most sports fans never do.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
And I'm just looking at myself and I'm crammed in
the corner, just feeling like shit, like what the fuck
is wrong with me? Sorry, I don't know if I
can swim as you get Oh, we do, yes, What
is wrong with me? Why am I sitting here in
the corner of a bart train, sweat stained and smelling.
I'm like eight thirty on a Saturday night, when everybody
else is leading such a pleasant, normal life around me,
(01:44):
And I think I just felt that, like, like, why
do all of us do this so much? Why do
we do this to ourselves?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
He was on that train around twenty ten. Eric teaches math,
but Eric also writes the thought crossed his mind. Maybe
I should write about this. Maybe I should figure out
what's wrong with me, because someone needs to.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I was very naive at this point. I was a
science writer. I wrote mostly about scientists, and I thought,
you know, I'll go find a scientist, and a scientist
will answer it for me, because that's sort of what
I did. I'd have a question and I'd find an expert,
and the expert would say, oh, yeah, this. I honestly
sort of thought, you know, there's some guys studies sports
fans at Harvard and they'll say, yeah, there's this little
part of your brain there, and if you nuke that sucker,
(02:27):
you'd be healthy again.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
If only it were that easy. I'm Michael Lewis, and
this is against the rules. Each season we've taken a
character in American life who also happens to be a
character in American sports. The referee, the coach, the expert.
(02:54):
These characters have changed, their roles, have evolved in ways
that tell us not just about sports, but about the
world we live in. This season, the character will be
exploring is the fan. Being a fan is less a
(03:14):
role than an emotional state. And that emotional state hasn't
changed much since the fifth century BC, when Greeks hollered
at other Greeks racing chariots. What's changing is how that
emotional state can be exploited. That's a huge deal because
it's shaping our society in all sorts of ways. This
fact has been staring me in the face for the
longest time. Now, I'm thinking right now, when I was
(03:37):
writing Moneyball, that book was about a baseball team with
no money, the Oakland A's figuring out that the other
baseball teams were behaving irrationally and exploiting that they sparked
a revolution not just in sports, but in business, in politics,
and all sorts of other things. Even now, you can't
help but wonder why Oakland. Why did this world changing
(04:00):
event occur inside this baseball team with not too many
fans and no money. So few fans and so little
money that the Oakland A's are as I speak, packing
up their bags and on their way to Las Vegas
in search of more fans and more money. Back when
the Oakland A's were inventing moneyball, their lack of resources
was obviously important. It forced the A's management to think
(04:24):
differently to compete with the teams with more money. But
another explanation was the Oakland fan or his absence. Back
when I was writing the book, the Oakland management said
this thing over and over. We are so lucky. We
don't have a big, noisy fan base paying much attention
to what we do. The Oakland's front office didn't have
(04:46):
this loud mob hollering at them to do the same
stupid stuff that the other baseball people were doing. They
weren't being egged on by their fans and by their
local media in the same way that say, the Yankees
or the Red Sox were a lot of people who
manage baseball teams were effectively playing craps to impress the
crowd around the table. The Oakland management was off quietly
(05:06):
counting cards at the blackjack table. They could ignore fan
emotion and rid themselves of fan biases, and that was
just a huge tactical advantage. A weird sort of combat
line runs through the modern economy. That's what this entire
season is really about, the gap between the people who
(05:28):
count cards and the people who don't even realize the
cards can be counted. Either you're one of these smart
people able to measure and analyze and calculate probabilities and
place your bets as rationally as possible, or you are
their prey.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
A fan, so you know, just like Google, you know,
sports fan researchers.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And to be honest, not that much comes up. And
it's like, well, why is that?
Speaker 1 (05:54):
I definitely have a weak spot for writers who come
along and point out something important that's just been sitting
there forever unnoticed. Fifteen years ago, Eric Simons did just that.
He noticed how weirdly he behaved as a fan, his irrationality,
how unhappy it could make him. He asked, what's the
(06:14):
matter with me?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
This is a thing that is you know, billions of
dollars and everyone does it, and it's true across culture
is like, why isn't there this, you know, the Institute
for the Study of Sports Fans at every university on
the planet, and so you know, I started started there.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
They're all too busy going to the football games, right,
That's why there's a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Of truth to that.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Eric Simon set out to find someone, anyone who could
help him to explain the weird things his mind was doing,
and back then, if you did that, you eventually ended
up meeting Dan Juan. I can't figure out, for dramatic purposes,
whether it's better to call you Professor Waller Dan.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah, I I will leave that up to you.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
The only thing I care about is what my grand
shaw calls me Dan Dan. Beyond that, I really don't
really there.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Danje is a psychology professor at Murray State University in
Western Kentucky. Professor one's kind of great because it's the
professor of something that nobody else is a professor of.
Sor Dan or his students have written some huge number
of serious academic articles with titles like is there really
no Crying in Baseball? Examining the acceptance of crying in sport?
(07:32):
And feeling suck and so does your team, exploring the
link between restrictive emotionality and dysfunctional fandom. But for a
long time, as far as Dan knew, he was the
world's only full time sports fan researcher. He invented the
(07:52):
field by accident. As a graduate student back in nineteen
eighty seven. On the first day of class, his professor
gave him a homework assignment find some testable hypothesis about
human behavior. He'd gone home and watched Sports Center instead.
There were only two students in Dan's class, and when
it was time to present, the professor called on Dan. First.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
I had one hundred percent forgotten about the assignment. I
am now just making cramp up as I go along,
and I said, well, I think there had been this
story on the sports and about a soccer rise. Well,
I think that if an individual is really highly identified
psychologic connected to their sports team, they're probably more likely
(08:36):
to get violent when they're watching the team.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
If things don't work.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Out on the spot, Dan cooks up his testable hypothesis.
He believes the sports fans most likely to start fights
after a loss are the sports fans most devoted to
that team. This hypothesis will be a breeze to test.
He thinks, surely someone in the world of psychology has
already looked into it.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
When you go.
Speaker 5 (08:59):
Back and you look back at people who've studied fans,
what do you find a random study or two on
fan viol And if you ever found anybody who wrote
like an opinion or an essay about sport fandom, they
all just slammed it.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Everybody loves sport except for the you know, the eggheads
are actually studying sport.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
So Dan designs his own study. He discovers, to his surprise,
that there's little correlation between fans devotion to their teams
and their willingness to punch people. He starts to look
further into the lives of dedicated fans.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Sports fans are more politically active than non sports fans.
They're more likely to go museums and non sports fans.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
They're more likely to play sports, they're more likely to
go to the theater, They're more likely to donate.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
They're also more likely to have higher GPAs.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
So they're not lazy.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
No, they're not.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Now again, okay, some are right, I mean, they gotta
always admit right that they're out there.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
But no, the vast majority are are quite involved.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Now.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Obviously all fans aren't the same. There are nuances here,
and Dan one began to explore them. What began with
a forgotten homework assignment became a stream of published papers, the.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
Reviews, and the response I got from academics and journals,
and that the media was so positive that I just
basically scuttled everything else and decided to just study this.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
For thirty five years.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
It's kind of odd if you think about it. Basically
no one else wanted to study sports fans, but lots
of people, even people who ran serious academic journals, were
curious about them.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
It's this social category where the editors and their reviewers
there's a decent chance, no guarantee, there's a decent chance
that they're sports fans, and they're like, yeah, why in
the world am I doing this.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
It's that same question again, and no one's answering it.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
People are so curious as to why it is such
a large chunk of the population will dedicate such time
and money and love and desire and emotion and sadness
and whatever you know to this voluntary activity. Right, no
one's like twisting their arm and making them go do
this and they have very very little, if any, controlled
(11:16):
over the outcome.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I mean, you can't find another place in society where
that's the case, right.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Where people care so much about something and they walk
in going, yeah, you know, there's about a fifty to
fifty chance that I'm gonna hate this at the end
of consuming it.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
I can't control the outcome. Let's go.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Let's go back to nineteen eighty seven is a starting point,
the year danjan forgot his homework and stumbled into a career.
In nineteen eighty seven, the highest rated TV program in
the United States, according to Nielsen research, was The Cosby Show,
followed by a Different World, Cheers and The Golden Girls.
(12:05):
Only one of the top thirty TV shows in nineteen
eighty seven had anything to do with sports. Monday Night
Football came in sixteenth. TV's changed a lot since nineteen
eighty seven. In twenty twenty three, ninety three of the
one hundred most watched broadcasts in the United States were
sporting events. Twenty NFL games drew bigger crowds than the
(12:29):
State of the Union address, fifty eight NFL games, and
one college football game had more viewers than the oscars.
Only when you get to the second hundred most watched
TV shows, does football start to get some competition from
basketball and baseball, pro golf and the Kentucky Derby. There's
(12:49):
no longer any question of whether sports and sports fans
are central to our culture. The question is does our
culture have a center without them?
Speaker 6 (13:03):
What about the fans? What about the fan?
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Andrew Brant runs the Center for Sport Sorts Law at
Villanova University, but before that he spent a decade running
the business end of the Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 6 (13:17):
And I feel for the fan because listen, I cover business,
and in these business negotiations between leagues and players, associations,
media networks and leagues, municipalities and teams about stadiums and
taxpayer money, the fans are not party, right, There's no
negotiation where well, let's see what the fan thinks.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
Right.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
So I understand sports is fun and games, and I
tell my students all the time, but it's not at
this level. It's not. It's a business, and it's a
cold business. You see players shipped out left and right.
You see fans kind of a pawn in the process,
but they keep coming back, They keep coming back.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
It's such an alluring product that the dollar doesn't have
to pay much attention to the interests of the buyer.
Speaker 6 (14:12):
Well, they come back despite despite prices rising, despite cable
bills rising, despite all those things. If there was a
breaking point where fans say that I've had enough, maybe
prices would change, maybe availability would change. We just don't know, but.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
We sort of do know. Booming ticket prices, teams jumping
around from city to city, players jumping around from team
to team, college sports becoming a raw money grab. People
used to say that greedy capitalism would kill fan interest,
but not a chance. No matter what you do to
the fan, or to his team or to his sport,
he's been willing to take it and come back for more.
(14:55):
The Green Bay Packers are the only pro sports teams
that's owned by their fans, and so they publish their
financial results. Andrew Brent knows this better than anyone. The Packers'
finances over time show you the dollar value of fan interest.
Speaker 6 (15:10):
So think about gross revenues, right. Gross revenues when I
got there in nineteen ninety nine were about two hundred million.
By the time I left in two thousand and nine,
Packers had revenues of four hundred and fifty million dollars,
so more than double that amount in a decade.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Back in nineteen eighty seven, the Packers, if they could
legally be sold, could have been bought for roughly ninety
million dollars. Forbes now values the team at five point
six billion. The Packers didn't publish their players' salaries back
in nineteen eighty seven. They weren't that interesting, but no
one made more than six figures. Last year, the team's
left tackle made twenty one point three million dollars. Who's
(15:54):
ultimately paying for all this the fans, of course, through
ticket sales, through cable bills, through less tangible ways like
taxes and viewership. There is a word for people who
pay more and more for the same product, and who
will continue to pay more and more no matter how
badly it makes them feel. Addict.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
I have spent the better part of three and a
half decades studying how sports fans cope with losses.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Professor Dan Wan again, the world's first sports fan researcher.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
All, it's like, give me a little toolbox, give me
the toolbox for coping.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Okay, So, first of all, sports fans are great at
seeing the past through incredibly rose colored glasses. Right, So
you ask people, okay, ten years ago, how many games
did your team win?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
They actually will overestimate that.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Coping strategy Number one for the addict, you ignore the facts,
you rewrite history, so whatever actually happened becomes what you
wish had happened.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
They also had a sendency to see the future as
being prettier than it's probably gonna be. So we like
construct our reality based on the fact our team's not
doing well now, but man, it was so great before,
and man it's gonna.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Be so great in the future.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
Every crappy NFL team, well, all the fan bases to
talk about next year's draft. That's what they always talk about,
because we're gonna have a good pick.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Coping Strategy Number two and active Fantasy life. Whatever just happened,
it doesn't matter because it has no bearing on what
will happen.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
Another thing that fans do is they will find a
way to move the cause off of the team and
onto some other entity.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
It was the ref's fault.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Coping strategy Number three, my personal favorite. We were robbed,
the game was stolen, rigged. It's all rigged. The fans
need to believe is so powerful that it warps reality.
You never need to change your belief, which brings us
to the weird stuff. Dan loves the weird stuff.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
One person said that his superstition was that when watching
his favorite team on TV, he had to go up
to the opposing team's free throw shooter and put his
hand over that person's eyes to distract him on the TV.
On the TV.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
This is a person who is getting a master's degree
from our psychology program.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Here's the thing.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Not only I mean I have to rub I have
to rub my favorite pack of baseball cards on my cat.
I have to light incense to the Buddha out back.
We can't let mom in the room because she's bad luck.
But here's the thing, Michael, here's the thing. We asked
him on a one to eight scale, one not at
all eight hundred percent, how convinced are you that your
(19:02):
superstitions impact the outcome of the sporting event?
Speaker 3 (19:06):
And the average score was about five.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
Think about that. These are educated people, right, and were like, well,
are you gonna stop? Well, I know it's silly, but
I still.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Have to do it.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
This isn't just people doing obviously dumb shit. It's people
capable of knowing they're doing dumb shit and somehow still
refusing to know it.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
We had one person he actually did his own study
with this lucky Saint Louis Cardinals' hat, where he kept
track for a whole season of how many they won
when he wore the hat and how many they won
when he didn't.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
And he showed us this is scientific. Now, this is scientific.
He showed us how they had a better winning percent.
So now he asked to wear the.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Hat, warping reality, blaming others, embracing superstitions, all to cope
with a very basic situation that you can't control all
symptoms of fandom. All right, let's get back to Eric
(20:08):
Simon's the math teacher and science writer who was on
the Bart train after his team lost, wondering what was
wrong with him. You established pretty quickly there was not
some part of your brain that was responsible for this, right,
It's all your brain. Eric eventually writes an entire book
about all of this, It's called The Secret Lives of
Sports Fans. Trying to figure out what's underneath all the
(20:29):
weird behavior, Eric winds up talking to neurologists and psychologists
people had learned all kinds of interesting stuff about the
human brain, but hadn't thought to apply it to the
brains of sports fans.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
This is what our hormones do when we're working against
other people. This is what we do when we're in groups.
It's affecting your judgments. I think people talk about this
more in a societal context than a sports fan context.
But like a basic example, there's cameras everywhere, there's slow
mo instant replay everywhere. Why is it that with like
(21:03):
nineteen different instant replays people divide, They get more convinced
I'm right, the other guys are wrong. How can you
show two people video clips in super slow motion and
they still disagree about what happened? Is because, like this
whole enterprise is challenging your perception. It's changing what you see.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
It's changing what you see. So we not only tolerate,
but actively pursue interests that lead us to warp reality.
But what purpose does that serve? One answer that Eric
found had been supplied long ago by a Polish social
psychologist named Henry Tagfel. Tagfell had his own curious journey
to the subject.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
He is Jewish in the nineteen twenties. Nineteen thirties, then
moves to France just before the start of World War Two.
He volunteers for the French army he has captured. He
goes home to Poland after the war and finds out
that most of his friends and family have been killed,
and this sort of sets him on this course of
(22:05):
trying to understand why do people do this? Where do
these divisions in societies come from, Where does prejudice come from?
Why do people have this ability to turn against each
other in such a way to stop recognizing each other's humanity.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Cag Pellat survived the war only because he'd become identified
with a group to which he didn't really belong French soldiers,
rather than to the one he did Polish Jews. He
wanted to study the power of groups, and so he
started by taking his students and just dividing them in two.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
And one of his principal findings, which is called minimal
group theory, is that doesn't have to matter the differences
between the groups, that you could be divided into groups
incredibly arbitrarily. He divided kids, mostly schoolboys in his studies
into groups on the basis of flipping a coin, and
(23:05):
what he found and what collaborators found is that just
that arbitrary division you guys are over here, you guys
are over here, is enough to then produce pretty significant
differences in how those groups behave toward each other. For
no other reason than we said, you're in that one
and you're in that one.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
So much shallower than the difference between the Chiefs and
the Bengals.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Then yeah, I mean, these were all kids from the
same school, they're you know, all sort of the same age.
They are a pretty homogeneous group. You put someone in
a group and you tell them you're in this group,
and your identity becomes I'm part of this group.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
This is my place. I belong here with these other
people like me. That feeling, once I have it is
so powerful it will cause me to organize all my
beliefs and perceptions around it. It'll dictate my reality.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
If we all have these sort of biases, you know,
and you see them expressed so neatly in sports, then
maybe sports is a way to look at sort of
slowly unraveling them, which is where I started to look
at these questions about you know, like why doesn't instant
replay change anyone's mind? And you know what do you
need to to like make a friend from across the aisle.
(24:26):
You know, where where could you find that sort of
harmonious utopia?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Not in Philadelphia, But that's why it's.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
So so interesting to look at where where has it
ever existed? So finding that line, which involves sort of
changing our own our own perception and changing the perception
of other people, that sort of that became the big question.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
You'll notice that Eric changed his question. When he started
he was asking what the hell's wrong with me? By
the end, he's asking why can't human beings, once they
identify with some group, see the world as it is
rather than as they'd like it to be. Why are
they even less inclined than usual to respond to fact
and to stats and more inclined to be swayed by
(25:12):
some story in their heads? Why can't they see that
the odds are against them? This new question is obviously bigger,
maybe even better than Eric's original one, but it leaves
the original one just kind of hanging there.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I started because I felt like there was something wrong
with me, and I think I ended up feeling like, well,
maybe this is more normal than it feels. This is
just sort of part of being human. That is just
weird to be a person sometimes, and that sports fans
is one part of being weird as a person. But
it has its moments of sweetness, and it has its
(25:48):
moments of joy as well as it has its moments
of what the fuck, this is the dumbest thing? Why
do I do it? And that all that together, I mean,
that is the package of being alive. And you accept
it in this context the same way you accepted everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Eric Simons sort of hoped that he might study his
way out of fandom. He wound up giving up on
that and just coming to terms with it. There was
no magic pill to take. There was just this powerful
force inside him, a force that shapes not just sports
but lots of other stuff, A force that steam rolls
over facts in search of feeling. But this powerful force
(26:33):
that's inside of us. What happens if it can be
exploited in new ways. What happens if like technology changes,
their laws change so that it could be monetized, almost
like a natural resource. What if you can frack the fan?
That's where we're going with this season against the rules,
because the fracking it's already happening right under our noses.
Speaker 6 (26:58):
This isn't fantasy as usually, this is Draft Kicks. It
was one of these things like, wow, we never get
this lucky. I mean this changed everything.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Welcome to the big time.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Turn to him and say, do you know why you
can do this now? He knew? Regeemed your season on FanDuel,
play free until you win FanDuel More ways to win.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Hello, I'm a dinner again and I just placed the
dumbest bet of my life.
Speaker 7 (27:24):
Get to DraftKings dot com.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael
Lewis and produced by Lydia Genekott, Catherine Gerardeau, and Ariela Markowitz.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Jake Krski.
Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and John Evans
of stell Wagon Sinfinett. Our fact checker is Lauren Ves
Polly Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.
(27:58):
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
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on our Apple Show page.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
So I went away to cope. Yeah no, seriously, Now, okay,
I got a story. I got a story for all this. Okay, no, no.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
No, no one.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Lady said that the night before her football team or
college football team's games, that for good luck, she makes
her husband make love to her wearing the team's jersey
and socks and the team's colors. And ever since I
read that, I thought, no one looks for the college
football sus a more than her husband.
Speaker 6 (28:53):
Right, He's like, he's looking for the socks.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Where did I put those?
Speaker 6 (28:59):
Oh? No, I lost the socks.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Oh the lucky socks.
Speaker 6 (29:02):
Well one sock, dude.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
No, listen, you wear the lucky socks and you get lucky.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
You know, I went to a game with my dad
and my brother and it was miserable and awful, and
we're all frustrated and mad.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Eric Simon's high school math teacher in northern California. Typical
sports fan in some ways. He fell in love with
his favorite teams as a little kid after his dad
took him to some games. Now he's all grown up
but still going to games.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'm riding home. I'm taking bart back across from Berkeley
into the city on a Saturday night, and I'm sitting
there and I have like a headache from wearing a
dumb hat that is like constricted my head for too long,
and I've been standing in the sun, and i had
like a miserable dinner, and there's all these people around
me riding bart in for like a nice night. They're
dressed up, they're going to bars, they're going to nice restaurants.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
But in one way, Eric was not typical. He was
starting to ask questions that most sports fans never do.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
And I'm just looking at myself and I'm crammed in
the corner, just feeling like shit, like what the fuck
is wrong with me? Sorry, I don't know if I
can swim as you get Oh, we do, yes, What
is wrong with me? Why am I sitting here in
the corner of a bart train, sweat stained and smelling.
I'm like eight thirty on a Saturday night, when everybody
else is leading such a pleasant, normal life around me,
(01:44):
And I think I just felt that, like, like, why
do all of us do this so much? Why do
we do this to ourselves?
Speaker 1 (01:50):
He was on that train around twenty ten. Eric teaches math,
but Eric also writes the thought crossed his mind. Maybe
I should write about this. Maybe I should figure out
what's wrong with me, because someone needs to.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I was very naive at this point. I was a
science writer. I wrote mostly about scientists, and I thought,
you know, I'll go find a scientist, and a scientist
will answer it for me, because that's sort of what
I did. I'd have a question and I'd find an expert,
and the expert would say, oh, yeah, this. I honestly
sort of thought, you know, there's some guys studies sports
fans at Harvard and they'll say, yeah, there's this little
part of your brain there, and if you nuke that sucker,
(02:27):
you'd be healthy again.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
If only it were that easy. I'm Michael Lewis, and
this is against the rules. Each season we've taken a
character in American life who also happens to be a
character in American sports. The referee, the coach, the expert.
(02:54):
These characters have changed, their roles, have evolved in ways
that tell us not just about sports, but about the
world we live in. This season, the character will be
exploring is the fan. Being a fan is less a
(03:14):
role than an emotional state. And that emotional state hasn't
changed much since the fifth century BC, when Greeks hollered
at other Greeks racing chariots. What's changing is how that
emotional state can be exploited. That's a huge deal because
it's shaping our society in all sorts of ways. This
fact has been staring me in the face for the
longest time. Now, I'm thinking right now, when I was
(03:37):
writing Moneyball, that book was about a baseball team with
no money, the Oakland A's figuring out that the other
baseball teams were behaving irrationally and exploiting that they sparked
a revolution not just in sports, but in business, in politics,
and all sorts of other things. Even now, you can't
help but wonder why Oakland. Why did this world changing
(04:00):
event occur inside this baseball team with not too many
fans and no money. So few fans and so little
money that the Oakland A's are as I speak, packing
up their bags and on their way to Las Vegas
in search of more fans and more money. Back when
the Oakland A's were inventing moneyball, their lack of resources
was obviously important. It forced the A's management to think
(04:24):
differently to compete with the teams with more money. But
another explanation was the Oakland fan or his absence. Back
when I was writing the book, the Oakland management said
this thing over and over. We are so lucky. We
don't have a big, noisy fan base paying much attention
to what we do. The Oakland's front office didn't have
(04:46):
this loud mob hollering at them to do the same
stupid stuff that the other baseball people were doing. They
weren't being egged on by their fans and by their
local media in the same way that say, the Yankees
or the Red Sox were a lot of people who
manage baseball teams were effectively playing craps to impress the
crowd around the table. The Oakland management was off quietly
(05:06):
counting cards at the blackjack table. They could ignore fan
emotion and rid themselves of fan biases, and that was
just a huge tactical advantage. A weird sort of combat
line runs through the modern economy. That's what this entire
season is really about, the gap between the people who
(05:28):
count cards and the people who don't even realize the
cards can be counted. Either you're one of these smart
people able to measure and analyze and calculate probabilities and
place your bets as rationally as possible, or you are
their prey.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
A fan, so you know, just like Google, you know,
sports fan researchers.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And to be honest, not that much comes up. And
it's like, well, why is that?
Speaker 1 (05:54):
I definitely have a weak spot for writers who come
along and point out something important that's just been sitting
there forever unnoticed. Fifteen years ago, Eric Simons did just that.
He noticed how weirdly he behaved as a fan, his irrationality,
how unhappy it could make him. He asked, what's the
(06:14):
matter with me?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
This is a thing that is you know, billions of
dollars and everyone does it, and it's true across culture
is like, why isn't there this, you know, the Institute
for the Study of Sports Fans at every university on
the planet, and so you know, I started started there.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
They're all too busy going to the football games, right,
That's why there's a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Of truth to that.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Eric Simon set out to find someone, anyone who could
help him to explain the weird things his mind was doing,
and back then, if you did that, you eventually ended
up meeting Dan Juan. I can't figure out, for dramatic purposes,
whether it's better to call you Professor Waller Dan.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah, I I will leave that up to you.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
The only thing I care about is what my grand
shaw calls me Dan Dan. Beyond that, I really don't
really there.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Danje is a psychology professor at Murray State University in
Western Kentucky. Professor one's kind of great because it's the
professor of something that nobody else is a professor of.
Sor Dan or his students have written some huge number
of serious academic articles with titles like is there really
no Crying in Baseball? Examining the acceptance of crying in sport?
(07:32):
And feeling suck and so does your team, exploring the
link between restrictive emotionality and dysfunctional fandom. But for a
long time, as far as Dan knew, he was the
world's only full time sports fan researcher. He invented the
(07:52):
field by accident. As a graduate student back in nineteen
eighty seven. On the first day of class, his professor
gave him a homework assignment find some testable hypothesis about
human behavior. He'd gone home and watched Sports Center instead.
There were only two students in Dan's class, and when
it was time to present, the professor called on Dan. First.
Speaker 4 (08:16):
I had one hundred percent forgotten about the assignment. I
am now just making cramp up as I go along,
and I said, well, I think there had been this
story on the sports and about a soccer rise. Well,
I think that if an individual is really highly identified
psychologic connected to their sports team, they're probably more likely
(08:36):
to get violent when they're watching the team.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
If things don't work.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Out on the spot, Dan cooks up his testable hypothesis.
He believes the sports fans most likely to start fights
after a loss are the sports fans most devoted to
that team. This hypothesis will be a breeze to test.
He thinks, surely someone in the world of psychology has
already looked into it.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
When you go.
Speaker 5 (08:59):
Back and you look back at people who've studied fans,
what do you find a random study or two on
fan viol And if you ever found anybody who wrote
like an opinion or an essay about sport fandom, they
all just slammed it.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
Everybody loves sport except for the you know, the eggheads
are actually studying sport.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
So Dan designs his own study. He discovers, to his surprise,
that there's little correlation between fans devotion to their teams
and their willingness to punch people. He starts to look
further into the lives of dedicated fans.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Sports fans are more politically active than non sports fans.
They're more likely to go museums and non sports fans.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
They're more likely to play sports, they're more likely to
go to the theater, They're more likely to donate.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
They're also more likely to have higher GPAs.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
So they're not lazy.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
No, they're not.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
Now again, okay, some are right, I mean, they gotta
always admit right that they're out there.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
But no, the vast majority are are quite involved.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Now.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Obviously all fans aren't the same. There are nuances here,
and Dan one began to explore them. What began with
a forgotten homework assignment became a stream of published papers, the.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
Reviews, and the response I got from academics and journals,
and that the media was so positive that I just
basically scuttled everything else and decided to just study this.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
For thirty five years.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
It's kind of odd if you think about it. Basically
no one else wanted to study sports fans, but lots
of people, even people who ran serious academic journals, were
curious about them.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
It's this social category where the editors and their reviewers
there's a decent chance, no guarantee, there's a decent chance
that they're sports fans, and they're like, yeah, why in
the world am I doing this.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
It's that same question again, and no one's answering it.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
People are so curious as to why it is such
a large chunk of the population will dedicate such time
and money and love and desire and emotion and sadness
and whatever you know to this voluntary activity. Right, no
one's like twisting their arm and making them go do
this and they have very very little, if any, controlled
(11:16):
over the outcome.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I mean, you can't find another place in society where
that's the case, right.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Where people care so much about something and they walk
in going, yeah, you know, there's about a fifty to
fifty chance that I'm gonna hate this at the end
of consuming it.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
I can't control the outcome. Let's go.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Let's go back to nineteen eighty seven is a starting point,
the year danjan forgot his homework and stumbled into a career.
In nineteen eighty seven, the highest rated TV program in
the United States, according to Nielsen research, was The Cosby Show,
followed by a Different World, Cheers and The Golden Girls.
(12:05):
Only one of the top thirty TV shows in nineteen
eighty seven had anything to do with sports. Monday Night
Football came in sixteenth. TV's changed a lot since nineteen
eighty seven. In twenty twenty three, ninety three of the
one hundred most watched broadcasts in the United States were
sporting events. Twenty NFL games drew bigger crowds than the
(12:29):
State of the Union address, fifty eight NFL games, and
one college football game had more viewers than the oscars.
Only when you get to the second hundred most watched
TV shows, does football start to get some competition from
basketball and baseball, pro golf and the Kentucky Derby. There's
(12:49):
no longer any question of whether sports and sports fans
are central to our culture. The question is does our
culture have a center without them?
Speaker 6 (13:03):
What about the fans? What about the fan?
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Andrew Brant runs the Center for Sport Sorts Law at
Villanova University, but before that he spent a decade running
the business end of the Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 6 (13:17):
And I feel for the fan because listen, I cover business,
and in these business negotiations between leagues and players, associations,
media networks and leagues, municipalities and teams about stadiums and
taxpayer money, the fans are not party, right, There's no
negotiation where well, let's see what the fan thinks.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
Right.
Speaker 6 (13:42):
So I understand sports is fun and games, and I
tell my students all the time, but it's not at
this level. It's not. It's a business, and it's a
cold business. You see players shipped out left and right.
You see fans kind of a pawn in the process,
but they keep coming back, They keep coming back.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
It's such an alluring product that the dollar doesn't have
to pay much attention to the interests of the buyer.
Speaker 6 (14:12):
Well, they come back despite despite prices rising, despite cable
bills rising, despite all those things. If there was a
breaking point where fans say that I've had enough, maybe
prices would change, maybe availability would change. We just don't know, but.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
We sort of do know. Booming ticket prices, teams jumping
around from city to city, players jumping around from team
to team, college sports becoming a raw money grab. People
used to say that greedy capitalism would kill fan interest,
but not a chance. No matter what you do to
the fan, or to his team or to his sport,
he's been willing to take it and come back for more.
(14:55):
The Green Bay Packers are the only pro sports teams
that's owned by their fans, and so they publish their
financial results. Andrew Brent knows this better than anyone. The Packers'
finances over time show you the dollar value of fan interest.
Speaker 6 (15:10):
So think about gross revenues, right. Gross revenues when I
got there in nineteen ninety nine were about two hundred million.
By the time I left in two thousand and nine,
Packers had revenues of four hundred and fifty million dollars,
so more than double that amount in a decade.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Back in nineteen eighty seven, the Packers, if they could
legally be sold, could have been bought for roughly ninety
million dollars. Forbes now values the team at five point
six billion. The Packers didn't publish their players' salaries back
in nineteen eighty seven. They weren't that interesting, but no
one made more than six figures. Last year, the team's
left tackle made twenty one point three million dollars. Who's
(15:54):
ultimately paying for all this the fans, of course, through
ticket sales, through cable bills, through less tangible ways like
taxes and viewership. There is a word for people who
pay more and more for the same product, and who
will continue to pay more and more no matter how
badly it makes them feel. Addict.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
I have spent the better part of three and a
half decades studying how sports fans cope with losses.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Professor Dan Wan again, the world's first sports fan researcher.
Speaker 5 (16:29):
All, it's like, give me a little toolbox, give me
the toolbox for coping.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Okay, So, first of all, sports fans are great at
seeing the past through incredibly rose colored glasses. Right, So
you ask people, okay, ten years ago, how many games
did your team win?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
They actually will overestimate that.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Coping strategy Number one for the addict, you ignore the facts,
you rewrite history, so whatever actually happened becomes what you
wish had happened.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
They also had a sendency to see the future as
being prettier than it's probably gonna be. So we like
construct our reality based on the fact our team's not
doing well now, but man, it was so great before,
and man it's gonna.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Be so great in the future.
Speaker 4 (17:21):
Every crappy NFL team, well, all the fan bases to
talk about next year's draft. That's what they always talk about,
because we're gonna have a good pick.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Coping Strategy Number two and active Fantasy life. Whatever just happened,
it doesn't matter because it has no bearing on what
will happen.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
Another thing that fans do is they will find a
way to move the cause off of the team and
onto some other entity.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
It was the ref's fault.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Coping strategy Number three, my personal favorite. We were robbed,
the game was stolen, rigged. It's all rigged. The fans
need to believe is so powerful that it warps reality.
You never need to change your belief, which brings us
to the weird stuff. Dan loves the weird stuff.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
One person said that his superstition was that when watching
his favorite team on TV, he had to go up
to the opposing team's free throw shooter and put his
hand over that person's eyes to distract him on the TV.
On the TV.
Speaker 4 (18:32):
This is a person who is getting a master's degree
from our psychology program.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Here's the thing.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Not only I mean I have to rub I have
to rub my favorite pack of baseball cards on my cat.
I have to light incense to the Buddha out back.
We can't let mom in the room because she's bad luck.
But here's the thing, Michael, here's the thing. We asked
him on a one to eight scale, one not at
all eight hundred percent, how convinced are you that your
(19:02):
superstitions impact the outcome of the sporting event?
Speaker 3 (19:06):
And the average score was about five.
Speaker 4 (19:09):
Think about that. These are educated people, right, and were like, well,
are you gonna stop? Well, I know it's silly, but
I still.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Have to do it.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
This isn't just people doing obviously dumb shit. It's people
capable of knowing they're doing dumb shit and somehow still
refusing to know it.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
We had one person he actually did his own study
with this lucky Saint Louis Cardinals' hat, where he kept
track for a whole season of how many they won
when he wore the hat and how many they won
when he didn't.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
And he showed us this is scientific. Now, this is scientific.
He showed us how they had a better winning percent.
So now he asked to wear the.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Hat, warping reality, blaming others, embracing superstitions, all to cope
with a very basic situation that you can't control all
symptoms of fandom. All right, let's get back to Eric
(20:08):
Simon's the math teacher and science writer who was on
the Bart train after his team lost, wondering what was
wrong with him. You established pretty quickly there was not
some part of your brain that was responsible for this, right,
It's all your brain. Eric eventually writes an entire book
about all of this, It's called The Secret Lives of
Sports Fans. Trying to figure out what's underneath all the
(20:29):
weird behavior, Eric winds up talking to neurologists and psychologists
people had learned all kinds of interesting stuff about the
human brain, but hadn't thought to apply it to the
brains of sports fans.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
This is what our hormones do when we're working against
other people. This is what we do when we're in groups.
It's affecting your judgments. I think people talk about this
more in a societal context than a sports fan context.
But like a basic example, there's cameras everywhere, there's slow
mo instant replay everywhere. Why is it that with like
(21:03):
nineteen different instant replays people divide, They get more convinced
I'm right, the other guys are wrong. How can you
show two people video clips in super slow motion and
they still disagree about what happened? Is because, like this
whole enterprise is challenging your perception. It's changing what you see.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
It's changing what you see. So we not only tolerate,
but actively pursue interests that lead us to warp reality.
But what purpose does that serve? One answer that Eric
found had been supplied long ago by a Polish social
psychologist named Henry Tagfel. Tagfell had his own curious journey
to the subject.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
He is Jewish in the nineteen twenties. Nineteen thirties, then
moves to France just before the start of World War Two.
He volunteers for the French army he has captured. He
goes home to Poland after the war and finds out
that most of his friends and family have been killed,
and this sort of sets him on this course of
(22:05):
trying to understand why do people do this? Where do
these divisions in societies come from, Where does prejudice come from?
Why do people have this ability to turn against each
other in such a way to stop recognizing each other's humanity.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Cag Pellat survived the war only because he'd become identified
with a group to which he didn't really belong French soldiers,
rather than to the one he did Polish Jews. He
wanted to study the power of groups, and so he
started by taking his students and just dividing them in two.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
And one of his principal findings, which is called minimal
group theory, is that doesn't have to matter the differences
between the groups, that you could be divided into groups
incredibly arbitrarily. He divided kids, mostly schoolboys in his studies
into groups on the basis of flipping a coin, and
(23:05):
what he found and what collaborators found is that just
that arbitrary division you guys are over here, you guys
are over here, is enough to then produce pretty significant
differences in how those groups behave toward each other. For
no other reason than we said, you're in that one
and you're in that one.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
So much shallower than the difference between the Chiefs and
the Bengals.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Then yeah, I mean, these were all kids from the
same school, they're you know, all sort of the same age.
They are a pretty homogeneous group. You put someone in
a group and you tell them you're in this group,
and your identity becomes I'm part of this group.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
This is my place. I belong here with these other
people like me. That feeling, once I have it is
so powerful it will cause me to organize all my
beliefs and perceptions around it. It'll dictate my reality.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
If we all have these sort of biases, you know,
and you see them expressed so neatly in sports, then
maybe sports is a way to look at sort of
slowly unraveling them, which is where I started to look
at these questions about you know, like why doesn't instant
replay change anyone's mind? And you know what do you
need to to like make a friend from across the aisle.
(24:26):
You know, where where could you find that sort of
harmonious utopia?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Not in Philadelphia, But that's why it's.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
So so interesting to look at where where has it
ever existed? So finding that line, which involves sort of
changing our own our own perception and changing the perception
of other people, that sort of that became the big question.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
You'll notice that Eric changed his question. When he started
he was asking what the hell's wrong with me? By
the end, he's asking why can't human beings, once they
identify with some group, see the world as it is
rather than as they'd like it to be. Why are
they even less inclined than usual to respond to fact
and to stats and more inclined to be swayed by
(25:12):
some story in their heads? Why can't they see that
the odds are against them? This new question is obviously bigger,
maybe even better than Eric's original one, but it leaves
the original one just kind of hanging there.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
I started because I felt like there was something wrong
with me, and I think I ended up feeling like, well,
maybe this is more normal than it feels. This is
just sort of part of being human. That is just
weird to be a person sometimes, and that sports fans
is one part of being weird as a person. But
it has its moments of sweetness, and it has its
(25:48):
moments of joy as well as it has its moments
of what the fuck, this is the dumbest thing? Why
do I do it? And that all that together, I mean,
that is the package of being alive. And you accept
it in this context the same way you accepted everywhere else.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Eric Simons sort of hoped that he might study his
way out of fandom. He wound up giving up on
that and just coming to terms with it. There was
no magic pill to take. There was just this powerful
force inside him, a force that shapes not just sports
but lots of other stuff, A force that steam rolls
over facts in search of feeling. But this powerful force
(26:33):
that's inside of us. What happens if it can be
exploited in new ways. What happens if like technology changes,
their laws change so that it could be monetized, almost
like a natural resource. What if you can frack the fan?
That's where we're going with this season against the rules,
because the fracking it's already happening right under our noses.
Speaker 6 (26:58):
This isn't fantasy as usually, this is Draft Kicks. It
was one of these things like, wow, we never get
this lucky. I mean this changed everything.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Welcome to the big time.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Turn to him and say, do you know why you
can do this now? He knew? Regeemed your season on FanDuel,
play free until you win FanDuel More ways to win.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
Hello, I'm a dinner again and I just placed the
dumbest bet of my life.
Speaker 7 (27:24):
Get to DraftKings dot com.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael
Lewis and produced by Lydia Genekott, Catherine Gerardeau, and Ariela Markowitz.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Jake Krski.
Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and John Evans
of stell Wagon Sinfinett. Our fact checker is Lauren Ves
Polly Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.
(27:58):
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if
you'd like to listen to ad free and learn about
other eclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a
Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin dot fm, slash plus, or
on our Apple Show page.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
So I went away to cope. Yeah no, seriously, Now, okay,
I got a story. I got a story for all this. Okay, no, no.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
No, no one.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Lady said that the night before her football team or
college football team's games, that for good luck, she makes
her husband make love to her wearing the team's jersey
and socks and the team's colors. And ever since I
read that, I thought, no one looks for the college
football sus a more than her husband.
Speaker 6 (28:53):
Right, He's like, he's looking for the socks.
Speaker 3 (28:58):
Where did I put those?
Speaker 6 (28:59):
Oh? No, I lost the socks.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Oh the lucky socks.
Speaker 6 (29:02):
Well one sock, dude.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
No, listen, you wear the lucky socks and you get lucky.
Host
Michael Lewis
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