Do Fantasy football and sport betting disenchant sports too? Some people brought to sports for other reasons might end up being fans anyway. Wouldn’t you want more eyeballs on your product regardless of motivation?
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Tony Dungy is a misogynistic idiot. Taylor Swift has likely brought more fans to the sport this season than she’s driven away. She’s enormously popular, and her biggest fans have probably started watching Chiefs games just so they can see her, and because she’s become a football fan. They want to check out what she likes, and undoubtedly some of them have become fans as well. And having lived in KC for 11 years, I can tell you that no Chiefs fan is going to stop being a fan just because of Taylor Swift, no matter how much they dislike her.
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Not just English football. Kelly Ripa and her husband, Mark Consuelos, bought a minority stake in a lower tier Italian football club last year. So even B and C tier celebrities are getting in on the act. I think it’s mostly a reflection of the worldwide popularity of the sport, along with the fact that pro soccer in the US is still not that great.
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I wish she had a love interest who plays some other sport.
Seeing this image on FBOOK today – a celebration of one team “beating” another – makes me all the more dismayed by the popularity of that game’s violent thrills.
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It’s the modern day gladiatorial combat. Boxing and UFC and pro wrestling…some people love watching people beat the shit out of each other. At least wrestling is scripted, although a suspiciously high number of pro wrestlers have died from suicide, so I suspect CTE is common even in that fake sport (fake in that the outcome is predetermined…it’s not genuine competition).
Personally, I’m more of a baseball fan, although I quit watching that when MLB collectively said “meh” at the prevalence of steroid use, and then decided to punish some, but not most, of the steroid users.
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Poor ZFB1FIT5 is getting crushed there by #28/32
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WTF? Her boyfriend is a pro football player!!
This is old-man-yelling-at-clouds territory and people have been saying this since forever. I felt the same way when they started doing celebratory dances seemingly like every other play. Believe it or not there was a time when spiking the ball after a score wasn’t normal. Or when the number of luxury boxes in the stadium started determining when a franchise moves to a new city regardless of the number and knowledge of fans filling the cheap seats. Fans who actually know something about the sport are the bread and butter, but they’ve never been the ones to call the shots, and that’s nothing new. The ones that pay the piper call the tune, and they always want the song “More Spectacle Equals More Revenue”.
Answer: Because rich people aren’t taxed enough. 
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She’s gonna have quite a sight seeing what Labatt Blue and Fireball can convince people to do
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It’s also “line must go up” mentality. They saw that some of the biggest sports teams in the world (in terms of support) were nowhere near the richest and saw an opportunity. The only problem was that three of the biggest are unobtainable (Real Madrid and Barcelona are entirely fan owned with long waiting lists to join, and Bayern Munich has to be at least 50%+1 owned by fans, the same as most other German teams*).
English league teams don’t have these restrictions, as long as you can pass the Fit and Proper Person test (a complete joke that Donald Trump could pass) you can own a football club. The big problem for them is that most of the Premier League and Championship are owned and not looking to sell, so people are starting to look at league one and two teams (third and fourth tier), and occasionally National league (fifth tier) teams now that Ryan and Rob have shown there is potential there.
Carlisle United seemed like an odd choice to get bought, but the new owners say there is potential there because there are no nearby teams.
Newcastle United are the closest in England, at 100 km away, they have just been bought by Prince Bonesaw, after that there is Sunderland (owned by Kyril Louis-Dreyfus), Barrow (a rugby league town on a peninsula) and Morecambe (there have been Morecambe-Carlisle games where the Carlisle away supporters outnumbered the home supporters). In Scotland there are no teams of a similar quality until you get to Kilmarnock and Motherwell, and they are competing for local supporters with Celtic and Rangers.
Maybe they are right, even though the population density is very low in Cumbria and SW Scotland.
* Bayer Leverkusen’s corporate ownership has been grandfathered in, and RB Leipzig found a loophole by buying the remains of a lower league team and saying that Red Bull employees were the supporters. Everyone hates RB Leipzig.
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How did you miss that Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce? That’s crossed over from sports news to mainstream news for a couple of months.
For what it’s worth Kelce seems to be significantly less of a dipshit than most NFLers. He’s been vocally pro-vax, to the point that Aaron Rodgers has made fun of him for it by calling him Mr. Pfizer.
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I was commenting on exactly that, but added one too many question marks. I’ll correct it!
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Ahh, gotcha.
Relatedly, I think part of the vitriol behind the right’s hatred of Taylor Swift is because they assumed she was one of them. She started as a country artist, and they assume all country artists are conservatives. Then, even after she crossed over to mainstream pop, she was pretty apolitical, at least in public, so they just kept assuming she was one of them. Once she made it clear she was more on the left (probably closer to the center, but still), they felt betrayed. That’s why she’s getting more hate than Lady Gaga ever did. Lady Gaga was outspoken about her politics from day 1, so while they don’t like her, they always knew she wasn’t on their side. They thought Taylor was on their side for a long time, and when she made it clear she wasn’t, they got extra pissed, and it’s why Jesse Waters openly asked “Who got to her?” from the Biden Administration. It’s really weird, when you think about it.
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Yeah, and especially now that she and Kelce are an item. A (former) country music star and football player are outspoken progressives?
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Next a NASCAR driver will have a hammer and sickle instead of a traitor flag on his car/helmet or whatever.
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Way to go, Bhutan!
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