The unnecessary misery of being a loyal sports fan
Many would sooner cheat on their partners than discard their chronically underperforming team. But when our connection to these teams is illogical and often formed in childhood, why do we stay loyal when the pain is so intense?
By Cayle Reid
THE 2025 NFL SEASON kicked off a few months ago, beginning the same way it usually does for me: disappointingly. For some inexplicable reason, I’m a fan of the New York Giants, and it isn’t fun.
In 2012, I watched my first-ever NFL game, Super Bowl XLVI. On that February evening, the underdog Giants defeated the heavily favoured New England Patriots on the back of a dramatic game-winning drive. My naïve, 10-year-old self promptly decided that the Giants were my team. Born and raised in Sydney, I had never been to New York and felt no strong connection to the city or any of the Giants players. Even so, the next day I begged my mum to buy me a Giants hat – Mitchell & Ness snapbacks were huge on playgrounds at the time. When she eventually relented, my fate was sealed.
In the 14 years since that Super Bowl victory, the Giants have returned to the playoffs just twice, for one win. In the same period, they’ve had nine top-10 draft picks but never the first pick. The Giants finished the 2025 season with four wins and thirteen losses, though half of those wins came in the final two weeks of the season, when the playoffs were long since out of reach, moving the team’s draft pick from first to fifth. Deflating? Sure. But I’m used to it. (The Giants have had just three winning seasons since I became a fan.)
I often reflect on my decision to become a Giants fan, in the same manner that Matthew McConaughey tries to stop his younger self from leaving Earth in that iconic Interstellar scene (“Don’t let me leave,
Murph!”). What if I’d simply decided to watch something other than the Super Bowl on that fateful day? Would I have ended up supporting a different team? Would I follow the NFL at all?
I probably could have saved myself a lot of distress if I’d missed that one game. While I consider myself to be a reasonably wellfunctioning adult, on most Monday mornings from September to early January (rarely any later than that, as the Giants’ season typically conks out before the play-offs) I become an irritable, sullen mess. More recently, I’ve realised that I could still, perhaps, put an end to the torment. There’s nothing forcing me to stay loyal. Unlike the teams I support in other sports due to geographical proximity or familial or social ties, the Giants infiltrated my brain on the reasoning that they’ve always been my team. My relationship with them is mostly intangible: I’ve still never been to a game, speak to fellow fans only via online forums and discuss the NFL in person with only a small group of friends, all of whom support other – more successful – teams.
The consequences of jumping ship would be minimal, if not non-existent. I might cop some flak from my friends, but being a Giants fan ensures a weekly barrage of insults anyway. So, why do I persist? Why do any of us? If a marriage doesn’t work out, we can get a divorce. If we’re ready to move on from a job,
we can quit. We frequently fall out of touch with friends and don’t bother to reconnect. We can even switch political parties or religions as our views shift. Why do we have to stay loyal to a team we started supporting as children?
Of all the rules and norms governing human behaviour, failure to stick with your chosen sports team is one of the few universal taboos. No matter how beaten down, frustrated or downright depressed a fan may be, their fidelity is expected to be eternal, and monogamy is strictly enforced.
You can tell a lot about a person based on their sports team. In the UK, someone who follows a team that hasn’t been historically popular or successful but is now one of the league’s perennial contenders, like
Manchester City or Chelsea, will frequently be labelled a ‘glory hunter’. A glory hunter is someone who just wants to be behind the winning team and is unashamed of it. It’s a respectable approach, and one that will likely save you a lot of pain.
In the US, the more common term is ‘bandwagoner’. If you meet someone who’s a fan of the Kansas City Chiefs but isn’t from Kansas City, there’s a good chance they’re a bandwagoner – or a Taylor Swift fan. These fans exist in just about every sport. It’s only natural, I guess, to be more attracted to winners than losers. I suppose I started out as a glory hunter, jumping on the Giants’ bandwagon after a Super Bowl victory.
In a superstar-led league like the NBA, if someone is a fan of a team in a small-market city, but they aren’t from that city, they could have become a fan because of the buzziness, marketability or, in some cases, the aura of a star player. See: the Milwaukee Bucks and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Minnesota Timberwolves and Anthony Edwards, the Charlotte Hornets and LaMelo Ball. In my experience, these fans are more likely to be aspirational and ego-driven. They may see these superstars as a version of themselves they’d like to be.
A fan may have other reasons for selecting a team: they have cool colours and jerseys; they have a fun mascot; they have a name that rolls off the tongue; they are a celebrity’s favourite team; or they featured in a film, which is more common than you’d think in baseball. See: Moneyball (Oakland Athletics),
Major League (Cleveland Indians – now Guardians), or Little Big League (Minnesota Twins). If you support a team for any of these reasons, you’re likely to be carefree, happygo-lucky and generally cheerful. Good for you, I say.
Others are born into fandom or have it thrust upon them by convenience. If your parents are fans of a particular team, you’re likely to follow their lead. If your city of residence has only one team per sport, it makes sense to be a fan of that team, so you can regularly attend games.
In any case, there is a throughline between the reasons people choose a team: they aren’t losers. Unless your parents are fans, there isn’t really any good reason to choose a bunch of losers as your team for life. As an Australian detached from any connection to an overseas city, why would I choose to support the Cleveland Browns in the NFL, the Sacramento Kings in the NBA, Bolton in English football or Haas in Formula 1?
And yet, while most of us choose a team while they’re successful, we’re still expected to stick with them when their winning ways fade. In the darker times of rebuilds and playoff droughts, some will stop following a sport altogether. But no matter what, they won’t switch teams.
I don’t have a neat and tidy explanation for why I, and other sports fans, won’t ever change teams. At worst, we’ll lose interest in the sport, but we won’t switch allegiances. Perhaps it’s because, unlike a marriage, a job or mateship, sport offers the promise that things might suddenly get better. Loyalty to a bad team is a kind of radical optimism, a refusal to let go of the possibility that next season might be different, that the next draft pick or new coach will finally deliver salvation.
That’s the twisted nature of fandom. Misery is part of the journey, and if you haven’t experienced it, you haven’t gotten the complete fan experience. Following a team that’s perpetually bad gives you a warped sense of belonging, a badge of honour for surviving the weekly indignities, a way of saying: I’ve chosen suffering, and I’m sticking with it. If you can’t be a winner, you can at least be loyal. And in a world where everything from relationships to jobs feels increasingly disposable, that might actually be a good thing. Walking away from a losing team might be the logical move, but fandom isn’t logical. It’s faith without religion, patriotism without borders.
By repeatedly tuning in week after week, I’m no better than the moth that keeps flying into the same lightbulb. But I’ll keep doing it. And someday, when my team finally does win again – please, God, let it be within my lifetime – I’ll smugly insist that I saw it coming all along and rejoice. That’s the other great delusion of fandom: we suffer, we despair, but we always believe. Go Giants.
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