Being a Sports Fan Is a Bad Deal
I’ve been thinking about the return on investment in sports and I have to say – I think this is a bad deal . Not that there is something inherently bad about being a sports fan, but when you consider the cost – coupled with the limited emotional gain from your team that never won anything – your loyalty may seem less fun than fun. … dear curse.
The odds stack up against you
We will limit ourselves to this discussion of the major league sports in North America – MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL, each with approximately 30 teams. This means that in a given year, your team’s chances of winning the championship are approximately 3% . These are terrible odds, only slightly better than a single number bet on roulette (2.60%). It honestly doesn’t take into account how good your team is, but it also doesn’t suggest that your team is the Detroit Lions or Buffalo Sabers.
To put this in perspective, use this random number generator and imagine each flip of the number button is a year of your life as a fan: watch a player draft in the summer, listen to meaningless podcasts, buy the latest jersey, stay late to see overtime lost. work.
If you are lucky enough to get the numbers 1-3, your team won the championship in that particular year. However, if you are damned like me, you hit this button an average of 58 times before hitting the winning numbers (based on three tries). This means that I will probably die before my team wins again. Not good.
Losses hit harder than victories
We’ve talked about this before , but research has shown that the pain of failure lasts longer than that of winning, and that the sadness of failure is felt more than the joy of victory. (This is a familiar psychological concept in finance known as loss aversion , and it explains why passive investors tend to panic and sell off their assets when their investments hit a tough time.)
To make matters worse, the researchers found that wins are not as good when expected (as measured by pre-game odds). This seems true to me: my hometown Edmonton Oilers won the championship streak as a teenager, and do you know what it was like right after they won? As if I had just finished a delicious meal . And yet I still shudder at the injury I recently felt when I think of the team losing in Game 7 of the 2006 Finals as an underdog.
The costs add up
- To watch your favorite team, you need to pay for cable TV, Internet TV, or streaming subscriptions directly from each league. While you can get by around $ 25-30 for a basic cable to get all the games, you may have to add a sports kit that is about the same as the price of Internet TV : at least $ 80 a piece. per month or $ 960 per year .
- Assuming that you are a devoted fan, which runs at least one game a year and pays for two glasses of beer, hot dog and car park while you are there, the average cost will vary from 67 to 157 dollars (with a baseball on a low level, and other sports are more expensive).
- The cost of a subscription is also a serious investment. On average, a season pass will set you back anywhere from $ 900 to $ 4,000 a year (again, with baseball on the low).
- Assuming you want to buy the latest official jersey, the cumulative average across all four leagues suggests it will cost you another $ 250.
- According to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association , if you’re into fantasy sports, the cost of joining online leagues, betting, and research averages $ 653 per year.
Bottom line
All the disadvantages listed above aside, what about the benefits of being a fan? Sports can really be a great way to socialize and make friends, especially if you are not like me and have the emotional maturity to not care if your team wins or loses. In addition, it is interesting to go to the game from time to time, just for fun, despite its cost.
However, consider whether the return on your loyalty is diminishing. As a former sports blogger, I once spent up to 20 hours a week writing about a team from my hometown. Then I just got tired of it. The team sucks and I spent a lot of money watching and writing about a bad team, so I left. And guess what? The team remained bad for many years . I still watch these weird games, but generally pay less attention to what they do. This way I saved some money, saw fewer losses, and developed other interests. This is a permanent victory.