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When I was 10 years old, I was brainwashed. It was a perfectly legal maneuver. My uncle, who lived in New York City, observed that I liked to play baseball and took great care to impress upon me the superiority of the Yankees. This was the mid-1990s, an auspicious time to be hypnotized by pinstripes. Led by a telegenic talent who shared my first name, the team achieved dynastic dominance before the end of the decade. I grew up in McLean, Virginia, some 300 miles from the Bronx, but my parents stood by and allowed the indoctrination. My mom regarded sports the way a vegan looks at a porterhouse steak, while my dad’s appraisal of the Washington, D.C., sports scene was straightforward: The Redskins were sinfully bad, the Bullets were worse, and hockey was too boring to merit an opinion. Lacking an appealing hometown team, I became a kind of free-agent fan, seeking out teams—the Yankees, the Miami Heat, the Indianapolis Colts—with likable stars. A winning percentage north of .500 didn’t hurt, either.

And so, without intending to adopt any sort of triumphalist attitude toward sports, I became that most despised of figures in the eyes of the diehard: a fair-weather fan. For most of my life, this has been a heavy shame. I have muttered shy apologies to friends for not standing by the hometown teams, even as most of them failed to escape the vortex of mediocrity. When I hear “once in a lifetime,” I think: Only once? Why is fleeting happiness a worthwhile trade-off for decades of agony? But I’m done apologizing. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I’m right and everybody else is wrong. Rooting for winners is more than acceptable—it’s commendable. Fans shouldn’t put up with awfully managed teams for decades just because their parents liked those teams, as if sports were governed by the same rules and customs as medieval inheritance. Fans should feel free to shop for teams the way they do for any other product. What I’m proposing here is a theory of fluid fandom that would encourage, as opposed to stigmatize, promiscuous sports allegiances. By permanently anchoring themselves to teams from their hometown or even an adopted town, sports fans consign themselves to needless misery. They also distort the marketplace by sending a signal to team owners that winning is orthogonal to fans’ long-term interests. Fluid fandom, I submit, is the emotionally, civically, and maybe even morally superior way to consume sports.

Fair-weather fan is a slur I have long endured but never understood. (Only in a country with tens of millions of citizens rooting for regular losers based north of the 40th parallel—in such climes as Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis—could one sneer at the idea of “fair weather.”) The accusation is typically leveled by members of the many wretched tribes of sports addicts whose allegiances are dictated by geography or some cruel family curse. When Charles Darwin wrote of man bearing “the indelible stamp of his lowly origins,” he referred to all Homo sapiens, but the phrase might better fit its most sorrowful subspecies: people who still watch the Cleveland Browns. I can hear the critics now: What of loyalty? What of the ecstatic, once-in-a-lifetime feeling of having endured decades of failure only to be present at the championship moment? When I hear “once in a lifetime,” I think: Only once? Why is fleeting happiness a worthwhile trade-off for decades of agony? The belief that eventual victory will bring lasting happiness is a classic delusion; behavioral psychologists chalk it up to the “durability bias.” People assume that all sorts of positive events—a promotion, a wedding, a championship—will punch a ticket to permanent happiness. But no such ticket exists. All life is suffering, as Buddhists and Buffalo Bills fans will attest, and the suffering of sports fans is a biological fact. Studies led by researchers at the University of Utah and Indiana University have found that self-esteem, mood, and even testosterone levels plummet in male fans after a loss. Why relegate yourself to such misery?

One of the stronger arguments for unconditionally supporting even bad local teams is that doing so fosters a civic union that transcends class, politics, and other divisions, making small talk possible across otherwise unbridgeable divides. But this serves more aptly as an argument for the unifying power of sports than for any particular allegiance—many of my most entertaining sports conversations have been colorful exchanges with Red Sox fans. If anything, being a Yankees fan is a boon to sports banter; try getting somebody outside of Maryland to talk with you about the 2018 Baltimore Orioles. Rather than fostering civic bonds, blind loyalty makes our cities worse. Millions of people pledging unconditional devotion to any business threatens to imbue it with monopoly power. This power is plainly corrupting. America’s professional athletic leagues are essentially cartels. By prohibiting cities from having too many competing teams, they obligate fans to support local powerhouses owned by billionaires who use fans’ undying loyalty as emotional leverage for municipal extortion. Many of these owners make ludicrous financial demands of city and state governments. London, by contrast, has more than a dozen professional soccer clubs that move up and down through various leagues; as such, none are viewed as civically essential, and local governments tend not to subsidize their stadiums.

Katie Martin

According to Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College who has written prolifically about the financial aspects of sports, state and local governments in the United States have spent up to $24 billion on professional, amateur, and college stadiums since 1990. That is far beyond any sum the community value of a team could justify. In fact, some studies suggest that sports franchises might have a small negative effect on economic activity and employment. Not only do their stadiums tend to offer mostly part-time or temporary work, but they funnel local spending—which might otherwise go to an array of restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, and cinemas—into the pockets of millionaire athletes and billionaire owners.

When fat-cat owners aren’t begging cities for money, they’re raking it in from you, the ever-loyal fan. In the 2016–17 season, when the New York Knicks went 31–51, the team nonetheless received $10 million more from television deals than the NBA’s six lowest-earning teams combined, because millions and millions of fans refuse to give up on an owner who has repeatedly insulted them with poor management and ragtag teams. The Knicks haven’t made the conference finals in the 21st century. But what urgency does James Dolan, the Knicks owner, feel to build a more competitive squad when he knows that you and Spike Lee will be there through thick and thin? Of course, a devoted fan base doesn’t necessarily give rise to a crappy team; the Yankees are almost never bad. The point is that unconditional devotion permits incompetent management to go unpunished. In a world of more-fluid fandom, Dolan couldn’t count on inelastic demand for his terrible product. Last summer, on draft night, with the Knicks holding the eighth pick, Dolan skipped the event to play a gig with his blues band. This man is not loyal to you. Why are you loyal to him? For most of American history, sports allegiances have been determined by an arbitrary synthesis of birth, geography, and media exposure. The devotion of many baseball fans had less to do with star wattage than literal wattage. In the mid-1920s St. Louis debuted a 50,000-watt AM station, KMOX, which floated the play-by-play of Cardinals games across the middle of the country, from Peoria to Texas. Many Americans became fans of the Atlanta Braves not because their home was in Atlanta, but because Atlanta was in their home: The Braves were purchased by the television mogul Ted Turner in 1976 to fill hours of nightly programming for the widely carried cable network that became TBS.