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?
Sometimes you just gotta kill a toaster…
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.)
Destroying things and acting like a bully feels powerful and strong. They can’t do anything else, it’s a lack of problem-solving capabilities .
After a particular sports event a number of years ago, it was noted that reports of spousal abuse increased significantly that night. This is very sad.
Should ask somewhere else, you won’t find these people in a federated open-source communist link aggregator website.
People who destroy things over computer game outcomes: Why?
I’ve seen keyboards flipped, monitors punched through, controllers thrown. And that’s just in the home.
How does one get to a place mentally where burning and destroying things, over a computer game seem a reasonable thing to do?
More relatable?
Ironically, the only game I’ve ever damaged my own stuff over was a sportsball game.
Most games you fuck up due to your own incompetence, but football games and the like make you feel like you could do nothing wrong in a game and still lose. It’s infuriating.
I’d say, based on most of the answers here, that the reasons behind the sports scenario (people who are spectators) and the reasons behind the video game scenario (personal failure) are very different.
Apples to oranges.
Not really. It’s just as irrational. Why destroy something because you lost a video game? I’ve been frustrated before due to a game, but never anywhere near frustrated enough to destroy something that I paid a lot of money for and am very happy with. At most I’ll slap my desk or something, but that’s nowhere near hard enough to have any effect.
More relatable?
No
I’ve seen keyboards flipped, monitors punched through, controllers thrown. And that’s just in the home.
If this is true, then people in your home need some professional help. I have never seen something like that over a videogame
Rage quitting doesn’t have to involve destroying stuff. If you are so much out of control, you need help and I don’t mean that as a rhetoric figure.
Alpha male behavior up there with beating your girlfriend
Sometimes I think people forget we are animals, who have been acting civilized for a relatively short amount of time. Also, there are plenty of ways to damage our brains and increase aggression (violence, accidents, substances, etc).
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.
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 would go ahead recommend and not be a pompous ass who says sportsball, you are not better than others or unique because you don’t like sports.
And then to answer your question I don’t think it has much to do with the sport itself.
- i think it’s the trigger not the cause.
- Big crowd+alcohol and other substances
- the crowd anonymity effect or whatever if it even has a name, if only one person in a crowd starts kicking over a trashcan and gets some cheers, it can and will quickly spread through the crowd who will start doing it and/or escalate what they do as they feel kinda safe, because they are not doing it alone. The same way when you do something you are kinda afraid to do doing it with a friend (if you had any) gives you more courage.
Or to quote Man in Black “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals, and you know it.”
Think about January 6, you think if you ask then individually if it’s a good idea to go to the capitol alone and overthrow try to overthrow a government and theyd probably call you stupid for the idea, but put them in a crowd where they mutually encourage each other and give each other a sense of security and they will go ahead and do it the dumb bastards.
And then to answer your question I don’t think it has much to do with the sport itself.
To think of another example, I’ve seen a lot more violent anger in living rooms triggered by a video game than a sporting event.
I have yet to see any video game cause a riot.
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.
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.
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.
Part of this always makes me uneasy. I grew up knowing a lot of kids from rough backgrounds who loved sports but also went to a private school where a lot of folks looked down at stupid sports fans. To me, there’s always been an unpleasant whiff of classism to these anti sports takes. While sports finds fans at every strata, it’s hard to deny that the poorer one is the more likely you are to be into sports. (Go to any working man’s bar during a game night.) And it just has this taint of “sportsball is a waste of time for stupid poor people do and there are such better uses for the time and money!” And I just think back a couple months ago when I caught a playoff game in a veterans bar, watched as we scored and the whole bar waited patiently as an older Indigenous lady “ran” up and down the aisles draped in her Canucks cape to wild applause from the crowd. It’s moments of joy shared by complete strangers who might have nothing else in common but come together for these magical moments.
Edit: I don’t mean to imply or say that opposing sports is inherently classist or that you are being so.
I get where you’re coming from on the use of space. But, at least in my hometown, our arena is used almost every night; it hosts I think three or four different sports leagues (well, a few sports leagues plus, ugh, e-sports) as well as all concerts, comedians and expos. (To the point where our local team often has to do ridiculous road trips because of the arena scheduling.) Or you could look at Paris for the Olympics which used the opportunity to clean the Seine as well as put a literally world class swimming facility in a run down neighbourhood as part of a revitalization. (Or, back to my city, Vancouver, we used it to add a mass transit train line which has spurred a bunch of lower cost housing around stops, put in a few popular facilities in underserved areas.)
Some fields are much less multipurpose but the parking lots, that’s just a consequence of American transit etc. And while I think it’s ridiculous how much some local governments pay for stadiums and I wouldn’t want my government to do s but, they do it because those teams are incredibly popular. To blame their popularity and the poor decisions of governments on the sports though seems a little like getting angry at journalism because Russia, Hungary and others use it for nefarious ends.
fans fanaticism can utterly destroy local towns after a bad kick or pass or whatever.
I mean, I don’t think any town has been burned to the ground. We had two of the worst North American sports riots twice in the last 30 years (yay) but the destruction was pretty limited to a small section of downtown and it was more just embarrassing than anything else. And frankly, any city that has a fanbase large and passionate enough to riot is probably a city that really loves that sports team. Even though we’ve rioted twice, every time the playoffs come around, the city is awash in Canucks gear, little flags, towels etc.
I don’t really have a problem with youth sports. But it shouldn’t be a “profession”.
I don’t think you get youth sports without professional sports. We have lacrosse leagues (technically our national sport) but almost no one plays, it’s not the same without your heroes whom you’ve watched growing up. Watch even young kids practicing or fooling around, a good number of them will have their favourite player’s jersey on.
On the finances or advancement, okay, let’s consider a simple one, pets. Americans spend more than 180 billion on their pets every year! They provide some psychological benefits but so do sports. That money could feed every hungry person in America maybe 6 or 7 times over. That’s not to mention the environmental damage etc. But, rich people are as likely if not more to have pets and everyone basically finds them cute so, they aren’t referred to as a waste of resources.
It’s called displacement aggression The sportsball fan identifies with his team to the point that it feels like he lost the game himself. Since he can’t express his frustration and subsequent aggression towards the opposing team (since he is in front of his TV several 100km away), he expresses it towards the next best thing that is weaker and accessible, e.g. furniture, walls, wife and kids…
It’s also really heavily about tribalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism
Because people like to be part of a specific group and feel like the goals of said group are their goals, regardless of the reality of the thing
I personally find it weird when fans use “us” and “we” when discussing their sports team as if they have anything to do with how the team performs or is managed. I just call my local/city sports teams by their name.
Now do politics 🐸
It is always weird to hear fans refer to what happened in a game as “we”
Yeah… Kinda like a political party or government?
Since he can’t express his frustration and subsequent aggression
towards the opposing teamin a way that someone who can regulate their emotions would…
The easiest, but not necessarily the most applicable answer, is that it is possible to wager money on the outcome of sports games. Very large sums of money. Ruinous, life-altering sums.
The more common answer is that this is a sense of personality for some people. They identify with a certain sports team and spend a lot of their time cheering them on and building up the belief that they are the best team, undefeatable under any fair circumstance. When that team loses, they then take it personally. After all, if their team lost, could it mean they’re not actually the best team? Did I choose wrong?
No. Impossible. It’s those damn referees, blind as they are, missing the most obvious fouls and treating my team unfairly, punishing my team’s players more harshly for the tiniest infractions. Nay, not even that; my team didn’t break the rules; it’s that other team’s fault!
&c., &c., until you get bored.
It isn’t reasoning driving these decisions. It’s emotion. And before any of us get too haughty about it, it’s also a very human reaction. Humans were not designed to reason, we were designed to feel. And yes, everyone has a set of circumstances that will cause their logical processing to shut off and allow emotion to take control. It just might not be sports.
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 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.
Gambling.
