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.
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’ve never been interested in the “big” pro sports as many times it’s watching a bunch of millionaires working a sweat. Ever since they invented the multi million transfers, it stopped being about a sport and just became watching an investment firm
I’d rather watch local amateur games
Last year I went to the league championship of my local lower level pro soccer club. Tickets were $40 each for good seats and it was a sell out. Our team won and it was honestly a blast.
I don’t know that I would have had a better time at a top tier pro sports final that would have cost thousands to attend.
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.
I have my favorite teams and sometimes I liken sports as a form of escapism. But, I do not ever religiously watch sports shows, listen to a lot of sports networks and actively follow anything closely. I am only there when the World Series, NBA Finals and the Super Bowl happens.
Can’t say I’ve ever attended a game, paid a ticket, bought any merch and whatnot. All of that just sound like money sinks to me. I am as minimal effort as they come when it comes to sports.
I think quite frankly, that athletes are simply overpaid. I always often wonder as to how much of their salaried contracts could go to better things than just dumping multi-millions into a few year long contract. And trust me, I get it, it’s a lot of hard work for an athlete to be in shape, remain in shape and deal with the grueling travel and schedules of some leagues. But, still, we’re talking millions to people who’re all set for life, regardless unless they turn out to be trainwrecks of human beings.
I find the amount of gambling present outright obscene
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.
I feel the same about sports as I have my whole life … worthless waste of time and money.
I never really cared about professional sports and probably never will. Everything of it is overpriced and more often than not the fans of any party are insufferable/ extreme. Hooligans and stuff like that.
I once started watching LoL eSports (G2 mostly) and even then I found the fans of any club extreme.
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.
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’ve tried to get into watching sports a number of times before. I do enjoy the athleticism and strategy needed to play and win, but I think you picked out the bug bears I also had fairly well.
I’ve found playing sports much more rewarding than watching them.
Jays fan, so it was an interesting year. quite the finish, very entertaining
but holy fuck do I ever hate SportsNet for having such a shitty fucking streaming service. and jesus fucking christ the gambling ads.
I doubt I’ll pay them next year - I only did this year because of how well the Jays were doing at the end of the year. last year I canceled mid year I think because I was sick of how shitty their fucking app was. also, what happened to the 2 minute 5 minute and 10 minute recaps? that shit was great, perfect for sitting down to eat breakfast or lunch and catch up on last night’s game. I fucking loved those things in 2024 but this year they just didn’t do it or something.
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.
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?
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.
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.
