Do rivalries spill over from one league to another? Do people have a positive view of a local NFL team but a negative one of a local NHL team? If two teams in different leagues & locations share an owner, would you support the other team because of the shared owner?

15 comments

  1. I follow hockey, baseball, football, and (to a lesser degree) soccer regularly. As for the second question, you can get a “Yankees suck” chant going pretty much anywhere in New England; never mind general sporting events

  3. People tend to follow their local teams, regardless of who owns them.

    With respect to rivalries, those are generally contained within a given league/sport. A person might hate the Pittsburgh Steelers in football, but also have no strong opinions about the Pirates in baseball.

  4. the leagues are pretty separate from one another. it’s not terribly uncommon for someone to be a massive college football & NFL fan, but not really keep up too closely with the NBA, for example.

    or they might like the local team in one league, but be a fan of a team in a different state for another league. usually this is bc people move to different states fairly often. from experience, people *will* ask you about why you support the far away team, so you need to have your explanation ready to go.

  5. The vast majority of sports fans watch 2 or more sport. Being fans of 4+ sports is pretty common, and that may or may not include college sports. As opposed to bleeding over rivalries it doesn’t really happen because league structures and alignments. On top of that, people aren’t synonymous with sports teams all the time. I’m a Tennessee Vols fan, warriors fan, and cowboys fan. None of my teams rivalries match up with rivalry markets (that I can think of). As for the owner thing I don’t think anyone gives a dick about the owner unless they’re Donald Sterling or Jerry Jones (totally different reasons tho). It matters more in baseball because of a lack of salary cap but no one is going to say they follow teams with the same owner

    That said Boston/nyc, nyc/Philly, Boston/la, la/sf, dallas/houston, and a couple over spill into multiple leagues.

    Personally I follow college football, college basketball, nba, nfl, ufc, golf, tennis, hockey (just the lightning since I live in Tampa bay), ufc, and I’ll tune into other sports not that’s not baseball or nascar. Hell, when I lived in Austin I got into f1. That’s 10 leagues outright

  6. I watch hockey, college football, and baseball.

    It’s really common to follow multiple sports, especially ones whose seasons don’t have a lot of overlap. There’s a few instances where rivalries between cities spill out into different spots, but that’s far from universal.

    I don’t really care who the owner is. I couldn’t even name the guy who owns my Bolts. It comes up a bit in motorsports, but on the whole ownership seems like thats a bigger deal in soccer. GMs get the spotlight a fair bit though.

  7. I live in the southern US and college sports is king down here. A major university will have a plethora of teams such as football, basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, lacrosse, swimming and diving, track and field, gymnastics and on and on.

    Generally, fans are loyal to one school.

    As far as pro sports are concerned, my experience has been that people generally don’t care about owners at all unless they have the perception that the owner prevents the team from winning in some way.

  8. I’ll answer these for Boston.

    Do rivalries spill over from one league to another?

    Yes, Boston hates New York, at least when it comes to sports. Doesn’t matter what sport though.

    Do people have a positive view of a local NFL team but a negative one of a local NHL team?

    This might be the case in some areas, but not for Boston. All the team are universally liked, more or less.

    If two teams in different leagues & locations share an owner, would you support the other team because of the shared owner?

    No. That would never happen. In fact I dislike the owner of the Boston Red Sox, John Henry. He also owns Liverpool, and the Pittsburgh Penguins (NHL team). I don’t care about the Premier League that much, but John Henry owning a team would not affect my decision to choose a team. For the NHL I already have the Bruins, which are not owned by John Henry (that’s a bonus), so I do care about the Penguins at all.

  9. No because they are separate sports. Do you not follow Cricket or Rugby because you follow your local football team?

  10. I follow a lot of sports.

    NFL

    College football

    MLB (casual)

    Motorsports

    Soccer (europe and US leagues)

    Don’t think rivalries really spill over or anything, but a lot of people from a region really are the fans of a same team.

  11. Mostly no, but Teams in the same city do support each other to some degree.

    Mostly when fans have a negative opinion, it usually against the Owner, General Manager, or the coach, on rare ocasions they activily hate player. Pretty much never hate the team.

  12. That’s what I’d like to know. Do UK/European football fans commonly follow any other sports? Because we have a ton of sports that have lots of followers. If you follow sports here, you usually follow several and pay some attention to others.

    NFL Football, college football, NBA basketball, college basketball, NHL hockey, baseball, soccer, NASCAR racing, Indy racing, golf, tennis, drag racing, horse racing, track and field, gymnastics, skating and others.

  14. In cities with multiple teams in all leagues there are often common groups of teams. For example, in New York people who follow the Yankees (baseball) also root for the Giants (football), Knicks (basketball) and Rangers (hockey). The alternative grouping is Mets/Jets/Nets/Islanders. That could be because all of those teams have either a rich/white collar or middle class/blue collar fan base.

  15. Most people are fans of their local teams, no one would like a different city’s team because of shared ownership. Some people are fans of random teams because they’re bandwagoners, so they “support” the Golden State, the Patriots, the Yankees and the Penguins. And it would not be uncommon for people like that to change allegiances when another team gets on a run. A trend I’ve noticed locally is some people being “die hard” Chicago fans except for football they like the Packers.

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like