Something You Should Know - SYSK TRENDING - The Extraordinary Benefits of Watching Sports

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

With all of the recent excitement surrounding the NBA & Stanley Cup finals and the World Cup you might wonder why do millions of people spend hours every week watching sports? Most people think of it as entertainment, a way to relax or pass the time. But what if watching sports is actually doing something good for your mind, your emotions, and even your health? That’s why today’s SYSK Trending topic is A lot of people look at sports fans and wonder what all the fuss is about. Why invest so much time and emotion in a team you don't play for and have no control over? Why let a win make your day or a loss ruin your mood? It turns out there may be a lot more going on than simple entertainment. Researchers have discovered that being a sports fan can provide surprising benefits for your physical health, mental wellbeing, and social life. Following a team can create a sense of belonging, strengthen social connections, reduce feelings of loneliness, and even help people cope with stress and adversity. In some cases, the benefits are remarkably similar to those that come from being part of a close-knit community. Sports fandom also gives people something increasingly rare in modern life: a shared experience. In a world where entertainment, news, and social media are highly personalized, millions of people still gather around the same games, celebrate the same victories, and suffer through the same defeats together. Larry Olmsted joins me to explain why sports fans may be happier, healthier, and more connected than non-fans. We discuss the science behind fandom, why rooting for a team can be good for your emotional health, how sports help build relationships, and why being a fan is about much more than the final score. Larry is a journalist and author of Fans: How Watching Sports Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Understanding (https://amzn.to/2T6YUs1). Whether you're a die-hard fan, a casual observer, or someone who has never understood sports at all, this conversation may change the way you think about what it means to be a fan. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AIR DOCTOR: Head to ⁠⁠⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com⁠⁠⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you’ll receive a free 3year warranty!  RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Professional in college sports are huge. And yet with all that's been written about sports in books and magazines and blogs and talked about on podcasts and radio and portrayed in movies and television, there isn't much about the fans. And yet sports without the fans, well, it's just a bunch of people playing a game. The fans are the biggest part. So writer Larry Olmsted decided to take a close look at sports fans, who they are, why they're fans, and what, if anything, does being a sports fan do for you?

He's written a book about it called Fans, How Watching Sports Makes Us Happier, healthier, and more understanding. Hey, Larry, welcome. Oh, it's great to be with you. When you look at sports fans, in essence, sports fans are people, a lot of people watching other people play a game. What is it about watching other people play a game that pulls people in and makes them such big fans? You know, I've given that a lot of thoughts because people who aren't sports fans say, oh, it's a waste of time watching, but they never say that about, like, watching movies or Broadway plays.

You know, it seems specific to sports. So I tried to really figure out what's different between sports and kind of every other form of popular entertainment. And I think the two big things are, for fans, you know, most people want a sense of community belonging. It's human nature in our DNA to be tribal creatures. And sports gives you that in a really accessible way that, you know, other kinds of entertainment don't. You know, you feel like if you're, you know, whatever, a Mets fan, you feel like you're part of the crowd, even when you're watching Alone at Home, which, like, I'm a Star Wars fan, but I don't get that. When I watch Star Wars on my couch, I know I'm just watching a movie.

I don't feel transported. So that's one big part of it is this just sense of community. And the other thing is the unpredictable real-time nature of sports. You know, it defies our DVR streaming culture because it's no fun if you know what happens before you watch it. And again, you know, I didn't have to watch nine Star Wars movies to know the good guys were eventually going to win. You know, most entertainment is predictable in that way. but sports is not. You have upsets and Cinderella stories,

and you could be watching that game when it's a perfect game or a historic moment. And that sort of anything can happen. Nature of it is really compelling. Well, it's interesting what you said about community because when you watch a Star Wars movie and the good guys, when Hans Solo and Luke Skywalker beat the bad guys,

you as the movie watcher, the moviegoer, don't say, ooh, we won. But you will often hear, sports fans when their team wins say, ooh, we won? They do, but actually what you bring up, it's sort of a classic of sports psychology research. A lot of times, fans always say we won, but a lot of times they say they lost. And it's like a psychological defense mechanism we have to distance ourselves from our team's failure, which is why, you know, even if your team is like 50-50 over the long-term,

studies have shown that sports fans gain happiness because the winning is more satisfying than the losing is disappointing because we have a number of these kind of circuit breakers that allow us to overlook the losses. So every win is that much sweeter. And yes, you're right, they feel like, I mean, studies people say that even when they're cheering at home, they feel like they have an impact on the game. It's also interesting to me to watch people watching on television, criticizing the play, criticize, why did he do that? Like, if I were a coach, I would have never done that. Like, they know better. Yeah, absolutely. And part of that was really, I think, driven a lot by the growth of

sports talk radio, you know, in the past couple of decades where there's a lot of opportunities for people to call in and kind of be Monday morning quarterbacks. It's made everybody more critical. But one of the more interesting, you know, I didn't know what I would find when I decided to see what being a sports fan did to us. And one of the sort of unforeseen benefits is it's really good for your brain and cognitive ability, especially fighting cognitive decline as we age. And it's very similar to like if you do Suduco or crossword puzzles every day. It's a real exercise for your brain.

And that's gotten even more so with all of the new statistics, especially baseball, the kind of money ball, saber metrics. People have to be more intellectual about their approach to being sports. fans in order to be critical and be informed and especially and also to play fantasy sports. Yeah, I want to talk more about the benefits because I don't think people ever think about that and it's pretty interesting that there are these benefits. But before we get into that, fundamentally, what do you think is the difference between the person who says, you know, sports are a waste of time or they're a very passive sports watcher? You know, they'll watch the World Series or they'll watch the Super Bowl, but you know, that's about it. versus the guy who goes to the games, has the chart, is keeping statistics on his little,

on his phone app or whatever. What's the difference between those people? Well, I mean, one is, you know, most people like sports. More than 50% of people identify themselves as sports fans, but, you know, not everyone does, just like not everyone likes rock music or something. So, you know, there's some people who just don't like sports. But I have found that a lot of people who say that, oh, I'm not a sports fan. It's a waste of time when you dig into it.

they have a lot of accepts, you know, except when I watched, you know, the Bulls win three titles when I lived in Chicago. You know, they still watch sports even though they say they don't. So, you know, that's a big part of it. But I think what I really found is the portrayal of the sports fan in the media, especially Hollywood TV sitcoms, I took a pretty deep dive. I looked at every basically sitcom and movie that depicted sports fans that I could find. And it's universally negative.

They're portraying this kind of old. overweight guy who is excluding his family, drinking too much with other overweight guys, dressed in uniforms in her basement, making fools of themselves, like the Saturday night, the bear skit. And so I think a lot of non-fans actually believe that as a perception of sports fans. And so then it's not just like a waste of time. It's a negative. But that stereotype just is not true. Well, it also seems that, well, at least for me, I was much more of a sports fan as a kid,

and less so as an adult. And I know a lot of people are even probably more sports fans as adults, but I kind of, I don't know, I don't want to say I grew out of it, but I mean, I was a Yankees fan. I grew up in Connecticut and, you know, I got to meet some of the big Yankee. I was really into it. Not so much anymore. Yeah, I mean, there's a variety of reasons.

One is, you know, you typically have less time, leisure time as you get older. You know, when you're a kid, you don't have kids. You don't have a lot of, you don't have a job, you don't have responsibilities, but, you know, in particular, baseball, you know, has seen a decline in fandom, you know, that, well, you know, the NFL and the NBA have gone up. And part of it is, you know, that we, our society in general, we live in a time where, um, we have a shorter tension span. Everything is, is more at a premium on time. And baseball takes a really long time. And baseball is cognizant of that. They've been trying to make rule changes to speed up the game. But, you know, it's, it's hard to commit, you know, three, hours to watch a game when there's 160 games a season.

Well, and there's also the cost. The cost of going to a game has certainly gone up, and that's got to be, you know, make people stop and think before they plop down the money. Yeah, absolutely. And there are, I mean, a lot of avid sports fans who never go to games, and the vast majority of sports are consumed on television. But I do think that's sort of, one of the negatives I came away with is how corporate some live sports have gotten, how expensive. You mean, you mentioned the Yankees. My wife is from the Broncos. When we lived in New York, we used to go to Yankees games and get the cheap seats. There are no cheap seats anymore.

You know, my dad would take me to Mets games. I grew up in Queens, and again, we would sit in the cheap seats. And it's become harder for families to do that because it's so expensive. And then when you get to people who, you know, really feel like they have to buy a licensed logo merchandise and $12 light beers and things, it can add up very quickly. But that's sort of the beauty of Spectator Sports is how diverse and democratic the way you can enjoy it is. you can spend nothing except your cable bill, or you can spend a ton of money and travel and go to the Super Bowl.

So let's talk about the benefits of being a sports fan. I mean, who's looked at this, and when did somebody come up with the idea that maybe there are benefits here? There's benefits on several levels, but really the mental health benefits, which are, you know, short of the most provable, are also the newest. It's really maybe the last 30 years, and one of the sports, like, probably the leading sports psychologists in the United States, probably the world, studying this particular issue, is Dr. Dan Wan from Kentucky. And he did his first study on this about 30 years ago and was so

sort of intrigued by the results that he kind of made it his life specialty. But now, in that 30 years, there have been hundreds of studies of sports fan mental health done around the world to fans of all ages, fans of all sports, professional, collegiate, and everything, you know, cricket, rugby, soccer, as well as all our sports. And no matter where they're done, they pretty much get, you know, exactly the same results, which is that there's a lot. I mean, psychologists have two dozen different distinct mental health benefits that sports fans enjoy more than non-fans, but things like higher self-esteem, lower rates of depression,

more happiness with their social lives. And again, you know, a lot of those have a common thread, which is this feeling of community and belonging. and that's something that makes people happy, and sports offers it in a way that is super accessible and requires no membership applications or, you know, you don't have to pass a test to become a Yankees fan. We're talking about sports fans, and my guest is Larry Olmsted, author of the book, Fans, How Watching Sports Makes Us Happier, Healthy, and More Understanding. So, Larry, are there big differences between either countries or fans of different sports, or is a sports fan, is a sports fan a sports fan?

Well, for the most part, a sports fan is a sports fan. The biggest distinction would be most of the studies that have been done are fans of team sports, which, again, is most sports fans, and most sports fans follow between five and six different sports. So, you know, that could be college football and pro football, but the one, you know, sort of odd man out or the outlier would be a person who only follows a, non-team sport, like golf or tennis is the only thing they watch. And they still get a lot of the same joys, but it's different because they don't get that kind of community aspect because there is no team. You know, and if you're, you know, Tiger Woods fan, you know, Tiger Woods is someday going

to stop playing golf, but presumably the Yankees will be here when we're all dead. So, you know, that would be the biggest difference, but there's very few people who only, you know, follow one sport. And then internationally, the big difference is college sports are huge in the United States. When college football is ahead of baseball in terms of professional baseball in terms of viewership, college basketball is huge. And they just don't have college sports anywhere else, anywhere near the way we have in the U.S. That's what when I talk to people in Europe, they're confused. And Americans don't typically think of that, but there's no equivalent.

You know, they have like, you know, the Henley Regatta where, you know, Oxford and Cambridge go in row. but there's no organized intercollegiate sports leagues in the rest of the world like we have. So it's a whole huge second infrastructure of sports that's distinctly American. It would seem that maybe that collegiate sports fans are a little different than professional sports fans. Often it's the school you went to or at least the conference in which the school you went to. or, you know, that there's a different connection. I don't know if it's better or worse, but, or is it? Yeah, it is.

I mean, because people, you know, people say, you know, my team or, you know, I like the Red Sox because, but the reality is choosing a sports team is basically exactly the same as choosing a religion, which means you don't really choose it. You're born into it. And the two biggest factors for both what religion you follow and what sports team you follow are, where you were born and what your parents believed. So, you know, I tell New York Giants fans, hey, if you'd been born in Dallas, you'd be cowboy fans, and they get upset.

But, you know, it's true. But college is different because it's something you come to later in life. It's, you know, unless you grew up in a big college town, it's typically driven by where you went, which is a little bit more of a choice and it comes later. But I would say, you know, I get asked a lot which city has the most passionate sports fans, and there's no real answer because they're differently passionate in Philadelphia and Denver and some of the big sports cities.

But of all sports fans, I think the most passionate are probably the big-time college football fans, especially that kind of University of Alabama, Michigan, Texas-type schools. I mean, you know, I didn't know until I wrote this book that you could buy official NCAA NCA logo coffins and be buried in like your University of Alabama coffin. And that's something Yankee fans aren't doing. So that's pretty impressive. good Lord. Can you imagine? I can't, but now that I, you know, I've talked to a lot of fans, I can imagine, you know, why they do.

And, you know, you see, you know, one of the other things I never thought of before I wrote this book in the same vein is, you know, if you drive America's roads highways, you see sports teams bumper stickers all the time, right? You know, my next door neighbor, I live in New England, has both a Patriots and a Red Sox bumper sticker on his pickup truck. But I've never seen a Harry Potter or a Star Wars bumper sticker or even a big, you know, Beatles, you know. So the way people, you know, choose to adorn themselves with sports logos, memorabilia, team identification is, is extremely distinctive to sports. It does seem that they're kind of lifelong fans tend to be lifelong fans, I guess, right? It seems that way. Although, like, when I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, yeah, it's kind of hard to be a Yankees fan here. So, yeah, I'm more of a Dodgers fan now, although I wouldn't consider myself a big diehard

Dodgers fan, but it's hard to stay loyal to a team when no one else around you is and you're a million miles away. Yeah, absolutely. I have a good friend who moved from Boston to Seattle years ago, big Patriots fan and now a big Seahawks fan, but if the Patriots and the Seahawks played in the Super Bowl, he would still be supporting the Patriots, and I would imagine you would probably still be supporting the Yankees. And one of the interesting things I looked at, you know, sports teams.

vanity license plates, which almost every state offers, and it's odd again because it's the only for-profit business that you can get a license. You can't get a Chevrolet license plate for your Chevrolet, but you can get a Yankees license plate from the government, which is kind of odd in itself. But California is one of the only states that doesn't do it. And so you can't get a Dodgers license plate in California, but you can still get a Dodgers license plate in New York all these years later. So I find that pretty interesting. When you did the research for this because you probably have taken a dive into this more than most. What are some of the things that really surprised you that we haven't talked about yet? Yeah, to me, the big thing is

the societal benefits. I mean, yep, it makes sense to me that, you know, if watching football makes you happy, then watching football makes you happy. You know, it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, a lot of the happiness, and then you enjoy benefits from that, you know, being happy is important to your health. But it's really the bigger picture of things, like the role of sports fandom in the civil rights movement, in the women's rights movement, now in the social justice movement. You know, it's really profound. And if you look at like the Jackie Robinson story is sort of the number one example.

There's lots of others. But, you know, that predates basically what historians identify as the civil rights movement and was a huge moment, pivotal watershed moment in American history made possible by sports fans. And there's a lot of those. and then the other big thing is the post-traumatic healing power of sports after man-made and natural disasters. And, you know, I lived in New York. I actually used to work in the World Trade Center.

So, like, I very vividly remember that first Mets game after 9-11. Baseball had been suspended or all sports had been suspended. The first game played in New York City after the resumption was his Braves. Mets game, everyone around the country watched. And I have fans, you know, people quoted. in the book who were there who told me like that was the moment it was okay to smile again, the moment it was okay to laugh, to clap. And, you know, I remember that, but I thought at the time that that was sort of a one-off,

but it's not. It's, I traced the history and after hurricanes, after Katrina, after tsunamis in the Far East, even now with the pandemic, I mean, sports is playing the same role. It's a place to, when you feel it's safe to go back out and be a member of society and gather and sit next to strangers and express joy, well, you know, there's no better place to do that than a sports stadium, which, you know, our biggest stadiums are bigger than the biggest mosques and cathedrals and synagogues.

There's no sort of public gathering place in America where you can go be part of society again more distinctly than at a sporting event. And, you know, and that has just gone after the Boston Marathon bombing, after the Las Vegas shooting massacre. I went out there and I interviewed people who wanted. after another told me how basically the Las Vegas Golden Knights and HL expansion team save their lives. And it's, you talk to enough people like that, then you, you know, I had my aha moment. You can't trivialize it. You can't say sports is a waste of time. It's a, it's a vital part of

the fabric of our society. Why do you think that some sports are so much more popular than others, you know, where soccer is such a big sport around the world, but not so much here. Hockey is not, you know, people go to hockey games, but not the way they go to baseball games. What is it about some sports versus other sports that make them so desirable? Yeah, I mean, a lot of it has to just do with historical kind of happenstance. I mean, hockey is basically traditionally a cold weather sport until, you know, technology came along. You could only play it in cold weather. You know, you couldn't build a hockey stadium in Florida, you know,

Florida before you had the technology to do that. So it tends to be Scandinavian countries, northern parts of Russia, Canada, you know, it kind of makes sense. The soccer one is more, I think, just happens. The American experience, you know, ever since since 1776, you know, we've kind of wanted to create our own things, right? Baseball, basketball, our sports, football, that we created out of whole cloth rather than adopting what was already the norm, you know, elsewhere, and soccer in particular really lends itself to not having a lot of means. I've, you know, I've traveled all over the world. I've been to a lot of less developed countries, and you see soccer fields everywhere,

and sometimes they're not fields. Sometimes they're paved lots. Sometimes they're gravel. Sometimes the net or the goal is a bunch of two-by-fours or PVC pipes, a range, but it's distinctive. You look and you say, huh, somebody plays soccer there. There's a big field with two kind of goal-looking structures, and all the kids in this town need to play soccer is a ball.

They don't need shoes. They don't need gear. They just need a ball. So it's very easy access grassroots all over the world. But America had the benefit of having been a fairly wealthy nation from the get-go, especially as organized sports arrived. So I think that's why, you know, we have gravitated towards sports that if you have parents who play youth sports, you know,

are very expensive in terms of equipment and travel. You know, youth hockey is a lot of money to play just in gear. Since this is a topic that people don't think about in the way that you've written about it, and the way that you speak about it, what do you think is the big takeaway from this, to look at sports through this different lens? What do we get from it? When I set out, I was trying to find out, you know, what being fans did to us. And what I found out was really that, you know, in addition to us individually,

sports fandom plays a continuous and very present role in world of things. affairs and the life we live around us. And I think that, you know, if you're a non-fan, if you're that person who thinks it's a waste of time, then you should educate yourself to realize that, you know, sports fandom has made your life and your world. You live in a better place, even if you never watched a game. To me, that was sort of a big takeaway. You can't, you can't avoid the benefits of sports fandom, even if you don't watch sports because, you know, they make us a more democratic, more tolerant society. Well, this is so interesting because, as you said right at the very beginning, you know, a lot has been written about sports, but very little about the sports fan, because when people write about sports, they write about the sport and the players.

But the fans are such an important part of the equation that no one ever really talks about. And I think it's really important to understand that part of the equation because without it, you know, sports ain't much. Larry Olmsted's been my guest. The name of the book is Fans, how watching sports makes us happier, healthier, and more. standing. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Larry. Thanks for being here today. This is fun. Thank you very much for having me. And that's it for this S-Y-S-K trending episode. I'm Mike Herruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know.