Fitting, that the day after the POTUS gave his State of the Union, we were asked to deliver a similar speech, albeit much shorter, about the current state of our thesis. It felt good to put this on paper and feel such a coherence of thought, but I’ve still got a long way to go.
My thesis began with an observation - today, we’re more likely to root for our fantasy team than our hometown team.
My hypothesis was though we live in a time in which we’ve never been more “connected” to our teams and sports via push notifications of scores, unfiltered tweets from our favorite athletes, and a seemingly endless supply of on-demand streaming highlights, we’ve paradoxically never been more disconnected from the tenents of true sports fandom - Narrative, Unpredictability, and especially Triablism - belonging to a community of people with a shared belief.
Since then, I’ve set out to explore new methods for fans to reconnect to their teams and each other. All of my solutions, however, kept running up against a roadblock, or Gatekeeper, in the stakeholder ecology of the sports industry - the Owners.
So, I asked the simple question - what if these owners were removed from the stakeholder ecology? What would it look like if fans were permitted to own and manage their own teams, much as they do their fantasy teams, and teams transformed from a for-profit-enterprise, back to their roots as a community service?
This isn’t a completely novel thought, as two teams have long existed under this model. The Football Club of Barcelona and the Green Bay Packers of the NFL are both fan owned, and to some degree, fan controlled. And while both of these teams are heavily critisized by other owners as unsustainable, Barcelona has won the most championships of any Spanish league team, while the Green Bay Packers hold more league championships than any team in NFL history. Simultaneously, they have some of the most passionate, emotionally invested fans on the planet - the Packers season ticket waiting list is currently 90,000 people long with an approximate wait time of 956 years. Clearly these models are not just sustainable, but superior.
I’ve also been examining models and trends outside of the sports industry, including the rise of collaborative consumption, microfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, and grassroots organization such as the success of MyBarackObama.com in the 2008 election. What these all have in common is the ability to capture the small actions of individuals and harness them into powerful, collective movements.
Our online products, such as Twitter and Facebook, race to create new online communities of people. But in my mind, there’s no better example of a community already in place than those who rally around their hometown teams. The actions of these people, their “fandom”, currently exists as singular, micro actions, which is rarely captured. When it is captured, its commercialized and exploited, thrown back at fans via beer advertisements, merchandise, and overpriced tickets.
In sociology + philosophy + religion, there’s a term known as “collective effervescence”, laid forth by Émile Durkheim, that describes the powerful feeling at events such as religious gatherings and sporting events in which a person ceases to exist as an individual, and rather, becomes a part of the crowd. I want to capture that same spirit. I’m working to change the relationship between fans and their teams by creating a system that transforms singular acts of fandom into a collective movement of fans influencing, and potentially taking back ownership, of their teams.
