I’ve seen tables flipped, tv sets punched through, furniture thrown. And that’s just in the home.
How does one get to a place mentally where burning and destroying things, over a sportsball game seem a reasonable thing to do?
When I was a kid I would get emotionally invested in the game, hoping my team would win and gritting my teeth because they might not.
I really cannot relate to this at all anymore. I might wish for my home team to win but if they don’t play well then that’s on them, and I am not going to lose sleep either way.
I can only guess that I got caught up in the games as a kid because my whole family was into them, rooting and clapping and groaning and swearing at the refs. I was small and my brain wasn’t fully formed and I just got caught up in that culture.
It looks patently ridiculous from the outside. But I guess some people’s entire society is so into sports that they reach adulthood with this tribalism intact. It is after all a form of entertainment and people crave excitement and something to care about.
I got sick of my emotions being caught up in an arbitrary thing that might go either way. It’s the same reason I hate holding stocks. When you wake up each day and see that you gained or lost money based on arbitrary forces you can’t control, it’s like having your emotions manipulated by RNG.
Gamers know that when a game is entirely driven by RNG its bullshit not worth playing.
I’m just a little sad that there are people in the world who have lived such empty, passionless lives that they can’t conceive of being so excited and invested in something that they could lose their self control for a moment
You think the only reason people could find destructive, violent behaviour to be unusual or difficult to understand is because they have no passion in their own lives?
I’m just a little sad that there are people in the world who have grown up in such violent, loveless homes that they can’t conceive of finding violent behaviour over a sports game disgusting.
I wonder how many of wives and partners who get the shit kicked out of them when their passionate “alpha” male’s favourite team loses would agree with you. Oh it’s OK, he had just lived such a full, passionate life that he sometimes loses his self control for a moment.
As on reddit, no one who does this is ever going to take accountability for it.(And no one who does this is going to be on Lemmy to begin with)
The sportsball team you cheer for is your tribe.
Your tribe meets up to go to war against other tribes regularly, you wear the same colors to recognize each other.
The goal is to beat the other tribe, show them who’s boss and acquire the shiny thing at the end.
The great thing is, you don’t even have to do anything to be part of the tribe, except wear the right colors and cheer (or boo) at the right time.It’s a pretty civilized way to channel our stone-age tribal urges into something that happens on a weekend, doesn’t interfere with your work, and can even be turned into profit. And sometimes a few things break, but that’s much better than the constant bloody feuds that were normal during most of human history.
You should see what happens when political tribalism takes place in the United States.
Strong emotions and financial strain with the working class at an all-time high, disdain towards other groups, and fights break out.
Assassination attempts and murder of activists and politicians due to disagreements.
I think it goes back to dividing the working class and keeping us entertained so we don’t pay attention to the status quo.
I dunno.
But I work in contract security. When the Super Bowl came to Minneapolis, it was one of the worst nights of My working-life.
I was walking through a bar to touch bases with their management (the bar was tenants of my client,) and a philly fan broke a bottle off and tried to shank me. That was the night before. All I did to provoke it? Walk behind him.
Another incident the night before, 3 guys were kicking the shit out of an oldish guy while two howling wives egged them on.
They were late twenties early thirties, their victim was a late-50’s black guy.
Their only “reason”? He was wearing a Vikings cap.
Over all, the only night that we had more arrests happen was when the city decided to set up a soft checkpoint for a trump rally with a day’s notice to my client next door.
When ever I start listing incidents other Philly fans are quick to say “no we’re just passionate!”
Green Bay is passionate. They dress up in their cosplay and drink all the beer then go home. (Though, probably some of the best tailgating you’ve ever seen…) they don’t beat the shit out of people.
As a philly native, I will say that the vast majority of philly fans are more reasonable levels of passionate, I’ve never personally been around anyone getting violent over a game, at worst just a lot of yelling and cursing directed at no one in particular.
But yeah, our worst fans definitely have a way of going the extra mile into the heart of crazytown.
Philly has a tough image and we’re proud of it and embrace it, but a lot of assholes don’t understand that being tough doesn’t mean being needlessly violent, offensive, and destructive.
Personally, I like the lunatics here that climb light poles and think of the city greasing them up as a challenge, that’s the kind of crazy fan I want to represent my city.
Really. A native and you’ve never personally seen it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7sW-0D_qhI
I only knew of one but after googling there appears to have been a few.
Yeah, astonishingly if you don’t wander into the crowded center city areas that are packed with people and bars, things are a lot more subdued.
There’s something 1½ million people in the city, a lot of whom are watching the game, either at home, in a friends house, or at one of the 1300 or so bars in the city, all spread out over about 140 square miles. If you don’t go seeking out the craziness, it’s easy to not see it in person.
Not to mention all of the eagles fans in the surrounding suburbs.
And take a good look at your video, how much actual violence or destructiveness are you seeing there? I’m seeing mostly a big crowd of people milling around outside chanting and yelling at no one in particular. Creating a nuisance or impeding traffic? Sure, hardly a riot or anything of the sort though.
You have, being generous, maybe a couple thousand people (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more people turn out to ride in the Philly naked bike ride) gathering around city hall, a major landmark located in the very heart of the city, and doing what? yelling? Maybe 2% of a city where “go birds” passes as a greeting, wandering around outside being a bit rowdy.
Yeah this isn’t really an argument between you guys as much as one saying “the worst of the worst is bad!” and another saying “yeah, they are! But most people aren’t the worst of the worst”.
that didn’t take long.
I mean, seriously. You’re aware that after a 49er’s game that turned violent, Eagles added jail cells - oh I’m sorry, the proper term is “holding cell”- to deal with all that… “passion”. and… no. I don’t mean a holding room that locks. they had full on jail cells. and before that, Veteran’s Field didn’t just have jail cell- it had a full on court room.
There’s also those incidents with the D-cell batteries. Plural. Totally normal fan-rivalry things to do. totally.
then there’s that time that eagle’s fans beat up Cheif Zee (redskin’s super fan.)- broken legs, ribs, and other injuries.
And what the fuck did Millie ever do to get harassed by crowds of phillie fans? she was a 90+ year old grandmother for crying out loud. the only thing she did to get the attention was get recognized for being an old vikings fan. Even then you had to drag out your geriatric fan and that wasn’t enough?
sure. Not all eagle’s fans are total assholes. most fans “aren’t that bad”. But you do realize, when other teams say the same thing, they’re talking about people that are singing a little too loud, or shouting obnoxious jingles or maybe they just got a little drunk. (I’m not kidding about packer’s fans drinking all the beer.)
I think you’re missing two large parts; escapism and booze.
From the sportsball moniker, I imagine you aren’t a fan. Sometime, it’s worth it to go to a bar that supporters of whatever team go to. There’s something magic about hooting, hollering and cheering with a crowd of complete strangers about this one thing. And in that brief couple of hours, it becomes larger and more magic. And some folks chasing that feeling get drunk and go too far when it goes wrong.
You’re missing the final piece, gambling losses.
I remember from the las football world cup someone on internet saying that doesent matter who wins the final, Paris streets will be destroyed anyway
Some people never get helped past the wall-crayon stage, but still need to express poetry no one wants.
What’s sportsball?
Perjorative term for all sports.
Mostly internet and I would imagine strongly correlated with those who are still angry they had an unpleasant high school experience.
Or those who think there’s an absurd amount of money and resources devoted to literally nothing productive. Every time the fuck cars people post about stadiums I really want to bitch about people who don’t live near or out in the country but seriously there’s WAY to much money spent on these places and events.
I really hate the “non productive” argument as you only see it with sports, not say, the video game or movie/tv industries. Just has this real whiff of “I don’t like this activity and I don’t see why anyone else should!”
Of all the non productive uses of money and time, at least sports has a bunch of ancillary benefits, especially for youth. I don’t imagine youth sports leagues, which keep kids in shape, keeps them doing something positive instead of the usual juvenile delinquent stuff we’d have been doing, teaching them to be a part of a team etc. And then those stadiums tend to get used for a bunch of cultural/musical events.
I don’t really have a problem with youth sports. But it shouldn’t be a “profession”. We shouldn’t allocate hundreds of acres of land for parking lots that are only used for barely half the year. Games and tv and movies advance tech at least and don’t each up billions and trillions of dollars of my money for shit I and many others will never use. There are dozens of studies on the utter uselessness of these facilities.
https://www.si.com/soccer/2015/05/01/ap-soc-brazil-useless-stadiums
They bring down the local economies and depending on the fans fanaticism can utterly destroy local towns after a bad kick or pass or whatever.
How much money and research has been devoted to proving that getting smacked in the head by a 400 lb wall of meat can cause concussions. Or more accurately to prove the misinformation that it wasn’t happening to be false.
Exactly. I used to think like this when younger, but I now see how stupid this mentality is. Basically anything we care about as humans is “non-productive”. Music, art, video games, musicals, movies, sports, etc. just because I don’t care about something doesn’t mean that it’s not important to someone else.
It’s just an excuse to vent, it them having to fight an actual person an probably get thier ass kicked. It’s just people being basic.
I personally can’t say why I would because I don’t but I can tell you why my friends do. Its because they drink a fuck ton of alcohol, bet way more money than they can afford and get caught up in the mob mentality.
there’s this little human thing called emotions that you might have missed, and some people are real bad at controlling them. the reasons behind that can be varied, but often they have a stake in the game (as in they’ve bet on it or similar).
Because many of these people are just fucking dumb and don’t have much going on in their lives. Seriously talk to an ultra fan and all they do is talk and think about their club. They have wrapped their entire lives and persona around the club. When their club loses they feel like that’s an direct attack on their own person, because the club is all they are. So because they feel attacked they have this urge to defend and lash out. Combine that with booze and cocaine and multiply that with hundreds of bozos and you have yourself a riot.
I live next to a sports bar. And many of the patrons definitely have lost a couple of screws.
Last week in my city people rioted because they couldn’t watch their precious football game. Because the cops were on strike and the mayor banned the match because of that. It’s like these people can’t find joy in anything else. Just football, booze and cocaine. Basically Bread and Circuses.
The UK sports experience
Sportsball is kinda a shit term - you don’t have to like sports and yes society venerates it over far more important achievements/pursuits, but it’s a bit childish to refer to it in that way.
My theory is that a lot of that kind of poor behaviour is generally from men who have grown up with the toxic masculinity traits of believing that sad is bad, angry is manly. I’ve seen people openly weep over the outcomes of a game - I think these people are feeling the same emotions but haven’t been given the societal permission to express it in its true form. So they do angry instead. It’s not acceptable at all but that’s what I think the reason is.
I think its a perfectly fine term. It applies evenly to ball-based games; football, gridiron football, rugby, basketball, hockey, cricket, baseball, etc… Y’know? Sportsball. The behaviour is similar across the fanbases.
It’s also kind of childish to get offended at it, and even more childish to have your ego wrapped up in a game, especially one that you’re not even playing
Meh, sportsball sucks.
