Few things are more high-reward/low-risk than briefly supporting a sports team.
Baseball. Basketball. Surf board. Ping pong. Rugby ball. As the Viagra Boys once rightly pointed out, there are so many sports.
It’s kind of overwhelming, and a little weird to see how genuinely into it all some people can get, especially when you have Taylor Swift’s wedding to care about. Still, every time there’s a big cup or a championship to win, I can’t help but pick up on the vibe shift. The pubs are packed, the water cooler chat is back and the internet feels like a fun place to visit again. When all the stars align, my heart knows it’s time to jump back on the bandwagon.
After all, is there anything more high-reward/low-risk than casual sports fandom? You reap all the highs while skipping over the lows by simply jumping ship as soon as things turn sour. Your happiness is not dictated by whether some dude kicks/throws/hits a ball right, but by your ability to tap out. You do not have to constantly convince yourself that it’s our year.
Bandwagoning is, you could say, a sport in and of itself. Personally, I like to choose which teams to temporarily back based not on tactics (I couldn’t tell you the difference between a half-back and a hooker and I’m not about to try to find out) but on vibes.
Rugby is usually too violent for my gentle soul but I am very partial to the theatre of football and the cute outfits you see on the tennis court. When Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce, I briefly flirted with the idea of following American football. My algorithm was so NBA-coded last month that it seemed a missed opportunity not to root for the New York Knicks. Of course, there’s another way to easily bandwagon: enter the office sweepstakes and hope for the best.
Winning teams make for a comfy bandwagon, but you can even be a short-term fan of the teams which are objectively not at all good. I briefly indulged in my ancestral curse of supporting Tottenham Hot Spur when the team was on the cusp of premier league relegation this year, mostly in solidarity with my long-suffering father. The Spurs may fail a vibes test but, if you’re a sucker for punishment, you can find a real thrill in rooting for the underdog, and watching them make it out alive, against all odds.
Mostly, it’s just nice to talk to the people that make you happy about something that makes them happy. Dad has someone to vent his football frustrations to, and the cheers ripping through the office make a nice ambiance. Plus, I’ve unlocked a whole genre of Instagram reels which I never thought I’d find funny.
Other upsides: You get a hall pass to scream “WE’RE SO BACK!” in a bar, knowing full well you have no idea where you’d been. For a moment in time, you’re a part of a conversation, even if you have zero interest in remaining a member of the community you’re pretending to be a part of.
The perks of pursuing this lifestyle instead of embracing actual fandom are abundant. Real sports fans should consider switching sides.
I know too many Wellingtonians addicted to the public humiliation ritual of being blown about in the cake tin every time the A-League comes around and having nothing to show for it. Why? They’ll tell you that the suffering is all a part of the appeal, which sounds eerily similar to the affirmations my home girls tell themselves when they don’t want to leave a mediocre man. It’s an addiction to psychological self-harm. It’s an unfulfilling situationship. It can’t be a healthy way to live.
Anyway, now that my sweepstakes teams have been kicked out of the FIFA World Cup, I can turn my full attention to my favourite vibe-based endurance sport event of the year: Love Island UK.
