Why Are Sports Teams So Geographical?
Why do teams have names like the Kansas City Chiefs instead of the American Republicans?
Team sports fandom is a massive but curious phenomenon.
For instance, why are almost all modern sports team fandoms set up around a geographic locus, such as the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the New York Knicks?
Why not have instead national teams called, say, the Republicans, the Small Business Owners, the Episcopalians, the College Graduates, the Blue-Eyed Blonds, and so forth?
Note that many American local newspapers tended to have names rather like that in the past.
And yet most modern sports leagues have relatively few geographic restrictions on players, such that Jerry Seinfeld pointed out, as had Pliny the Younger in 109 B.C. when complaining that Roman chariot-racing fans were obsessed with the blue, green, red, and white teams, that we are cheering for clothes.
I am the more astonished that so many thousands of grown men should be possessed again and again with a childish passion to look at galloping horses, and men standing upright in their chariots. If, indeed, they were attracted by the swiftness of the horses or the skill of the men, one could account for this enthusiasm. But in fact it is a bit of cloth they favour, a bit of cloth that captivates them. And if during the running the racers were to exchange colours, their partisans would change sides, and instantly forsake the very drivers and horses whom they were just before recognizing from afar, and clamorously saluting by name.
One of the most dramatic passages of the later volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are the Nika riots of A.D. 532, when the fans of the Blues and Greens temporarily united to threaten the rule of the Byzantine emperor Justinian.
To this day, historians haven’t agreed on exactly what, if any, material interests the long-warring Blues and Greens represented, leaving open the possibility that they really were sports fandoms run amok.
A few decades ago, it was widely assumed that in the future, sports teams would no longer be geographically-based, but instead represent giant corporations. In the cyber-punk imagination of the later 20th Century, the Olympics or World Cup would no longer be competed between, say, France and Germany, but instead between Nike and Coke.
After all, every American baseball fan has heard of the Nippon Ham Fighters, and many are aware that they don’t actually fight ham. Instead they are the Fighters owned by the giant Nippon Ham foot processing conglomerate. And what was more futuristic in 1990 than Japan?
So why not the Microsoft Mariners?
Except, that …
Paywall here.
