Just how much has technology changed fandom in sport? For one, most teams (and advertisers) ensure that fan engagement is a continuous round-the-year programme. Their money comes from our consistency.
With virtual, augmented and other forms of ‘reality’, fans could be following their favourites at one remove, meaning technology might actually be coming between fans and their favourite teams or players while enhancing the viewing experience.
I suspect we are in an in-between phase. Fans still want to watch events live — technology hasn’t entirely made it more attractive to stay at home and revel in an immersive experience. When that becomes the way the majority enjoy their sport, our stadiums will have the genuine fan who doesn’t need artificial aid to appreciate the action. Still, expressions of love can take many forms.
Indian fans cheering during the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup cricket, Super 8 match between India and Afghanistan, in in Bridgetown, Barbados. | Photo Credit: K.R Deepak / The Hindu
Traditionally, sports fans looked forward to future contests because when these happened, the past receded enough for them to change its colours.
Nostalgia is the natural ally of the sports fan, which is why we have lasting memories of events we weren’t witness to, many of which took place before we were born.
On a tour of New Zealand years ago, I met Bruce Taylor, who made a century and claimed five wickets on his Test debut in Kolkata. I reminded him of some of the action and how he had finally been caught by Budhi Kunderan. Taylor was impressed I remembered so much.
So was I, since I hadn’t watched the match, and even if I had, I would have been far too small. Fandom creates false memories; it is one of its charms.
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As the paleontologist and baseball nut Stephen Gould wrote, “We sit in our unsatisfactory present, surrounded by two mythologies that exalt their respective conflicting ends — better futures by the fancy of progress, and rosier pasts by the fable of golden old days.”
Fandom has been studied from various angles — a recent book by two philosophers speaks of the connection between sports fandom and identity, and asks whether it is better to be a committed fan of a particular team or to appreciate the sport from a neutral perspective.
There is, too, the individual fan and his mindset as opposed to a community of fans and that psychology.
Football fan Nick Hornby has written in Fever Pitch about how fans feel players are their representatives and embody the community.
This might be placing too heavy a burden on the players, individuals who might not take kindly to groupthink, where the teams and their fans are expected to have the same political or religious beliefs.
In My Life as a Fan, the American writer Wilfrid Sheed gave us another perspective, one that some fans might identify with: “So there they sat for years, the hours spent mulling and brooding, living and dying over various sports, adding up to a monument the size of a small city to wasted time and attention.”
Monument to Wasted Time might be an ironic title for a fan’s memoir!
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