"There is nothing quite like being pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with 40,000 of your closest friends, swaying, crying out, and moving fluidly like some great, biblical beast of yore. There are, of course, the athletes on the field or on the court running till their hearts give out, but you and your fellow fans will swear that the game took far more out of you, physically, mentally, and spiritually than they could ever understand.

It is a thing of ritual, of the sacred, of clan delineations and warlike fervor. You will go home from the game, encased in your cultural identity, and you will engage in further socialization and ritual bonding over social media and immerse yourself in dedicated spaces to discuss your fandom. You will wipe eye black or peel decals off your face and settle in at home, stewing in an emotional soup, win or lose."

excerpt from "Toward an Anthropology of Sport: A Cultural Perspective" by michelle crawford (that's me), december 2022

to an outsider, sports fans might seem to dedicate a disproportionate amount of emotional effort and attention to something trivial. it's hard to look past the fact that at the end of the day, you're watching people chase after a ball for hours. this is a literal interpretation that, while valid from the outside, leaves little in the way of "magic". what takes one from a spectator to a sports fan, someone "bought in" to the magic, is what the game and your team represents. sports fans engage in a kind of transformative identity creation, both for themselves and their teams; this is what turns a team's brand from just a business model to a symbol of a collective culture and a vibrant community.

in an article for the atlantic entitled "Just How Much Is Sports Fandom Like Religion?", michael serazio states that the sports team is a totem, symbolizing a greater meaning around which communities gather to strengthen their identities and create unity. around these totems, fans perform rituals, defined by Amanda Zunner-Keating as 

an act or series of regularly repeated acts that embody the beliefs of a group of people and create a sense of continuity and belonging [that] feature a sequence of activities, involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a specific place or time, and according to a set order

the places that fans gather to support their teams become centers of their communities and places to socialize outside of work and home called "third placeS". 

one of the things that make third places so special as anchors of the community is the presence of familiar faces and the inviting chance to belong and to be a part of something. cheers was right, sometimes you do want to go where everybody knows your name. this feeling is biological: 

Membership to social groups scaffolds human life in society. Extending previous experimental neuroscience evidence, our investigation shows that brain substrates of social participation are interrelated with health-related concepts like social support and psychological well-being at the population level. Among all 3 examined types of groups, we identified the DMN and limbic network as central for social participation.

the quote above is from the study Social belonging: brain structure and function is linked to membership in sports teams, religious groups, and social clubs by carolin kieckhaefer et al., which used mri imaging to view the brain function of those who consider themselves to be a part of a community group. allen et al. make the statement that

the principal design of the human brain and immune system is to keep the body biologically and physically safe by motivating people to avoid social threats and seek out social safety, connection, and belonging

sports fans are able to seek out third places as physical locations, but they can also find community virtually, taking the form of online message boards, insider Facebook groups, close-knit Twitter communities, or Discord servers. a thriving online community is often indicative of a fanbase that regularly attends games and have welcomed a sports team as a central part of their identity. these digital communities are an ethnographic gold mine. digital gathering places show that your fanbase cares enough about your program to engage with it longterm and show a desire for identity creation and a medium for tradition making and storytelling.

sports fans are more than consumers, and sporting events can be more than just a game. in a world crying out for community, and struggling with forming a set identity, sports teams provide a unifying factor and something to build lifelong relationships off of. erin c. tarver put this sentiment well in this quote from her book the i in team: sports fandom and the reproduction of identity:

sports fandom, both as formally ritualized and in everyday life, contributes to the constitution and reinforcement of identity. that identity is both individualizing, insofar as it creates subjects as knowable to themselves and others in particular ways, and creative of communities and groups...the regional (and sometimes racial) community of sports fans is constituted by the labors and practices of the sports fans themselves, who actively create and re- create its meaning, its boundaries, and its place in the world.