This summer saw the introduction of a new world championship to the soccer calendar. A year before hosting the World Cup — the most popular sporting event on the planet — the U.S. hosted the Club World Cup.
Introduced by International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) in an attempt to create a club world championship that held significance, the tournament featured 32 clubs, each chosen for being among the best teams of their continent. The tournament featured a billion-dollar prize pool and some of the most popular clubs in the world. But when the matches themselves rolled around, the tournament faced low interest and low attendance, with some games seeing more than 50,000 empty seats. It was a bad look for FIFA, and it begged the question: Why didn’t people care about a world championship for the world’s largest sport? And why do people care about sports at all?
The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896. The event totaled a little over 300 individual participants from 13 different countries — a far cry from the Paris Olympics’ more than 10,000 Olympians across 184 countries. Yet the Olympic’s opening ceremonies in 1896 saw a crowd of 60,000, quite the showing for an event that hadn’t been held in over a thousand years. But why would so many people show up for an event with so few nations competing and when so many of the world’s best athletes opted not to compete? History.
History is one aspect of sports competitions that pushes us to care, and not just about the final score. From Jackie Robinson breaking the baseball color barrier to the more than 3,000-year tradition of the Olympic Games, history adds weight to competition. Every step taken and every play made is the culmination of years dedicated by those who came before, or breaks new ground for those who will come after.
For the Olympics, the first event held in Athens was the culmination of thousands of years of history. The Club World Cup, on the other hand, had no such history to rely on. There was nothing to interest people in turning on a game between smaller teams the way they might watch archery or equestrian during the Olympics, which have the twin advantages of a prestigious history and an appeal to national pride.
Fans everywhere take pride in the people and teams that they root for, whether it’s a competitor from a similar background or a team they’ve followed all their lives. Sometimes, it’s national pride, like in the World Cup or the Olympics. Other times it’s simply pride to be a part of a common identity, like a single fanbase, city or school. The biggest teams, competitors and figures have fans from around the world who take pride in their fandom. So when some of the biggest soccer teams in the world played at the Club World Cup thousands of miles from home, their fans still showed up. But history and pride alone can’t explain the astonishing popularity of some sporting events.
This year on Super Bowl Sunday, well over 100 million Americans tuned in to watch the biggest event on the American sports calendar. Every year, the Super Bowl serves not only as the National Football League’s championship game, but as a cultural touchstone that draws in people who aren’t interested in football, or even sports at all. How does this happen? Well, the Super Bowl is a spectacle, where the ads are nearly as iconic as the game itself and where the halftime show is so huge it can pay its megastar performers a few thousand dollars and still be worth their time.
This is why we care about sports. The history, the pride, the spectacle. But why does that matter?
Sports are what you make of them. If you want, they can be a small bit of reality, complete with controversy, debate, heroes and villains. I prefer to treat sports as an escape from reality.
There is joy in an unheralded football team’s historic season, or a tennis star breaking records. There is a shared pride and identity in cheering on Oxy’s sports teams. There is tension as the clock ticks down on the Major League Baseball season, and the World Athletics Championships right now are already producing amazing storylines. So my advice is this: take a bit of time out of your day to learn about a player, a team or a sport. Find a story that interests you, and keep tabs on it. It’s good to have a little something else to care about from time to time.
Contact Whittaker Perrin at wperrin@oxy.edu
