The science of why fans love sports doesn’t explain bad writing about it

Eric Simons, author of “The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession,” has a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review with the headline “What science can tell sportswriters about why we love sports.”

I found what he has to say about why we love sports only mildly interesting, but what he has to say about how sportswriters talk about that subject quite compelling. Just in case your interests differ from mine, Simons writes that psychologists have settled on eight motivations for why people love sports:

Some of them are more common, but none is any more significant than any of the others. People like sports because they get self-esteem benefits from it. People like sports because they have money on it. People like sports because their boyfriend or girlfriend or family member likes sports. People like sports because it’s exciting. People like sports because it’s aesthetically pleasing. People like sports because, like the theater, it is a venue for emotional expression. People like sports because they need an escape from real-world troubles. People like sports because it provides a sense of belonging, a connection to a wider world.

Simon’s main point, though, is that sports fans love sports for all kinds of complicated reasons that have more to do with the individuals than with the sports themselves.

“The science also says that sports speak a different truth to each observer,” Simons writes. “Assigning them a collective narrative, like assigning a collective narrative to a billion soccer fans, obscures rather than defines the nature of their passion.”

And yet, we do that all the time. Simons opens his piece with a litany of examples, links to pieces from the 2014 World Cup in which writers had summed up the personality of entire nations as though they were all of one single, sports-loving mind. Spaniards in mourning over their elimination, Argentines finding joy in their team.

The takeaway of stories becomes, unsurprisingly: Sports exercises a lot of power over some people.

But how? And how much power? And which people? These narratives of fans, identity, and meaning underlie some testable hypothesis about how sports affect people but offer little in the way of empirical backing. Perhaps that’s because numbers would challenge the hypotheses.

It sounds to me like what science can tell sportswriters about why we love sports is: There’s such a thing as science. Quit faking it.