Sometimes it takes a good old-fashioned public opinion poll to tell us what we already know.
ESPN The Magazine (February 28/’05 issue) released the results of its annual research into the behaviours and attitudes of sporting fans, and presented some fairly significant observations.
Oh, some of the ‘findings” aren’t really findings, rather some pretty obvious stuff. We are told, for example that more and more fans care about the affordability of ticket prices to major league sporting events. This makes sense. Who wants to pay more, rather than less? We all realize that it is getting more and more difficult — in many cases impossible — for the “average” person to bring his kids to a pro game, especially when you factor in parking, food, etc.
But this is where something else of interest jumps out of the survey: “People care less about championships and more about honest ownership, strong coaching and players who give their best effort and act like pros.”
The magazine suggests this makes sense, especially in light of incessant steroid talk, for example, in the media and calls it “a fundamental shift in the relationship between the fans and teams”.
The Magazine quotes the President of the company that has conducted the annual surveys, who says, “ In the past, fans wanted their teams to ‘just win, baby’. But in 2004, we got to the point where it isn’t just about winning. It’s doing the right thing, with the kind of players you get and how you treat the community.”
Not that the surveyed opinions of a relatively few fans “proves” anything, but it’s hard not to feel that fans have grown disaffected by a lot of what has gone on in professional sports in recent years. Arrests and drug-use are so common it’s not something most fans seem to pay that much attention to. The NFL, for example, faces this “image” challenge on occasion, and still sells out every Sunday.
But fans, I sense, are increasingly turned off by the attitudes of many of today’s growing list of multi-millionaire athletes. Though fans have indeed helped create the problem — most of them innocently enough— many of those same fans seem to finally be reaching their limits when it comes to athletes who are disconnected from the very people who help pay their enormous salaries.
The NHL dispute certainly seems to validate this: The players clearly have never gained public sympathy, despite a highly unsympathetic opposition in NHL owners.
Who knew the disenchantment of hockey fans ran so deep? Clearly it was there, ready to burst, triggered finally by the realization that millionaires and billionaires couldn’t decide how to cut up the cash.
Basketball, it says here, will face its own very real problems with fans, especially if the Association and players determine a lockout is needed to ultimately find an equitable economic agreement.
Baseball fans will soon realize, if they haven’t already, that the home-run races that brought so many of them back to the strike-damaged game in the mid 1990’s was spurred by steroids, and steroids alone. We wanted to tell ourselves it wasn’t so, and no matter who denies what now, the fans know.
Greed kills so many things. And it shows itself in many ways. The whining for more and more money. The willingness to do and try anything to get bigger, faster, stronger.
Fans are slowly letting athletes know that they, the fans, want something different. But only when players are hit in the pocketbook — that is, when fans stop paying to go to or watch games on TV — will there be a real change where fans want to see it most: attitude.
