Sorry, But Your Fanbase is (Sorta) Toxic
It’s been a rough week for some of my teams and their fans.
Liverpool — not so much one of my teams as much as a club I happily adopted four years ago when I needed a rooting interest to get better versed in Premier League football — fell to Real Madrid, 3–1, in the first leg of their Champions League quarterfinal.
The New York Mets — very much one of my teams, if not my team — had their opening series vs. the Nationals postponed due to a COVID outbreak in their opponents’ clubhouse. Then when Opening Day finally came, the Mets rewarded their antsy fanbase by pulling Jacob deGrom after a characteristically sterling six-inning start, only to blow their 2–0 lead and make it justinterestingenough with a mini two-out rally in the ninth before losing to the Phillies, 5–3.
I didn’t come across anything more serious in my Mets social media spheres than the ritual calling for the manager’s firing after one game, and the colorful lamentation of the vaunted new bullpen signings who relinquished the lead.
But the fallout was particularly ugly for Liverpool, punctuated by racist abuse on social media aimed primarily at right back Trent Alexander-Arnold and midfielder Naby Keita. So ugly that the club itself released a statement condemning the racist abuse.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen a number of fans of both clubs reckon with something that, as the social media manager of a professional sports team, I’ve known to be the case for a long time: a considerable part of sports fandom is toxic. Impetuous and impatient, entitled and crass, racist and abusive. Not just that some sports fans suck, which is already a universally known truth. No, this is something more sinister: A not-insignificant number of fans — in every single fanbase, without exception — are toxic, abusive and deleterious to the well-being of players, staff and fellow fans.
I’ve seen this abuse in the Brooklyn Nets’ comments and mentions for three seasons, but it has gotten unmistakably worse. Specific to the Nets, the team is better, thus expectations are higher, thus tempers are shorter when the team fails to meet those expectations on any given night. That part is disappointing, but not surprising. But generally speaking, the proliferation of sports betting has brought a particularly sour brand of sports fan out of hiding. And undoubtedly, the pandemic has further fortified the silos built by social media, and our prolonged isolation from each other has only given trolls more of a license to spew vitriol without fear of consequence. If they ever felt like there were actual humans behind the accounts they were spamming, they definitely don’t feel that way anymore.
Literally no fanbase is immune from this sect of fan, and if you’re only coming to this realization now, then unlike me, you haven’t been following the exploits of the dregs of St. Louis Cardinal fandom for a decade. But it’s long past time to act like any of this is surprising. The wretched entitlement of so many sports fans on social media unable to put any of this in perspective is a rotten weight on all the well-meaning sports fans and professionals just looking to enjoy the entertainment in front of them in a healthy and constructive way.
I don’t know what the solution is. I can only recommend that you call this shit out when you see it and take regular breaks from social media — advice that goes 100-fold for the very perpetrators of abuse.
Be better fans. Be better social media users. Be better humans.
