This reminded me of those guys who are holyfuckingshittingly obsessed with the sports clubs they follow and are always wearing some kind of apparel. Often you'll see the club's merch everywhere in the subject's house.
For instance, my uncle is obsessed with a football club from my city, complete with having an official fan club subscription that, among other advantages, offers special discounts in more merch and also let him attend matches in a special area of the local stadium (a World Cup host at that), at least before the coof hit us big time. Every other time we visit him, or he visits us, he's wearing the club's shirt, one of many he has. Hell, I myself got him a vintage club shirt for his birthday not too long ago, so guilty as charged for indulging him as well.
Has sports-related consoomerism been discussed in this thread?
Sports are... kind of hard to categorize in terms of consoomerism because they're so popular, and rather than the solitary or exclusionary consoomerist hobbies, sports are social lubricant.
While there are a lot of die-hard fans and even more regular enthusiasts, there are also lots of people who only follow along while their city's sports team is on a playoff run, or won't watch a game by themselves but will go to a game with their buddies, not so much for the sport but for the experience. Unlike a movie, it can't be spoilered, and rather than sitting in silence, you get to talk, move around, and get really into it.
Nobody offline wants to be that fedora wearing, neckbearded and Cheeto-dust fingered geek going "HURR DURR sportsball is dumb! My pursuits are far more intellectual- you have to have a high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. Ackshually, it should be called 'handegg', not football*"
On the other hand, the merchandising makes
huge money. For motorsports especially, the merch far exceeds revenues for race viewership. A lot of that is because while very few people can afford $500 000 for a Ferrari, most people can afford $50 for a Ferrari cap and T-shirt or $5 for a Ferrari keychain.
There's also the debate over crowd energy and seeing the games. My local hockey team plays in a 19 000 seat arena. 15 000 seats are for season's ticket holders, most of those are companies, so there are a lot of empty seats. The remaining seats
start at around $430. The local baseball team, back in the 1980s, used to play in a big stadium that was a glorified grandstand with additions over the years for football and baseball, raising capacity from 10 000 to 43 000 for baseball and 50 000 for football. The cheapest seats, some 800ft from home plate, were the equivalent of $4 and were general admission. You could even get
undated tickets at grocery stores for $2.
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*The old soccer vs. football/futbal debate is annoying, because soccer, rugby, American, Canadian, Gaelic and Aussie Rules football are all football games. In the 19th century, almost every city and university had their own local variation of the game- everything from field size and shape, to whether you could use your hands or not, and eventually various leagues started settling on common rules so teams could play together. Soccer is Association Football, Rugby developed from the school with the same name, Canadian football took the rugby rules and added forward passing, American football developed from Canadian football with one less player per side, a smaller field and an extra down, and so on.
