Aaron C.T. Smith

It depends on the sport a little bit.

For example, NFL fans are very much connected to the team itself and that sense of identity.

NFL fans have the highest level of loyalty in terms of never missing a game, whereas NBA fans are more connected to the athletes and players themselves.

So it's possible that what you can have is, you know, one preferred club or team, but at the same time have a couple of players that you follow as well.

It appears that for most of those individuals, there's something about the particular player themselves that forges a sense of resonance or narrative.

There's just something, some angle, some connection, and that is what connects the fan to the sport.

It's via the player.

And so when that player perhaps concludes their winning run or retires or,

or even in some instances leaves the sport altogether, there tends to be a significant drop off to that sport.

So it's connected through the individual themselves.

Well, 776 BC with the first Olympics, there were fans of athletes in those times.

And we've seen, we've got historical examples of play becoming sport-like throughout history.

I mentioned earlier, and it wasn't entirely tongue-in-cheek to say that across human history and civilization, sport's been inevitable.

Sport has proven to be a cultural universal in every historical civilization across the globe.

For as long as we've recorded history, there's evidence that sport and organized play has been present and that in order to...

for that play to propagate, there's been fans.

And so it's become codified in a way where there are rules.

And as you know now, our rule making is quite extraordinary, our ability to create all of these codification and rules.

Yes, well, fandom is part of an entire social ecosystem, of course.

And that same sense of identity fusion that produces our interest in sport can also then become part of our co-creation of meaning, the way in which we experience life and receive interest and satisfaction from it.