On Sports And Their Importance

This is an essay from a collection of essays I’m working on. I decided to publish on Beehiiv as a work in progress to see if there is any interest in it at all! I might rework this essay some more before putting it in the eventual collection, and if this experiment has any payoff at all, I might publish more of the essays as work progresses on the collection! I barely mention women’s sports or women’s relationship to sports, because that’s not my story to tell as a man, there are many women writers out there doing good work if you want to learn about that.

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Sports have been a major part of my life and media consumption for a long time now. When I was a kid I went skiing in the winter and played football in the summer. This was normal in Norway at the time, and for a large part of our kids today it remains so. Although it has become harder to ski since I was a kid (big shout out to climate change and fewer snow days).

I stopped playing football when I was 14, stopped skiing earlier, but I don’t remember ever loving skiing the way I enjoyed football. I stopped playing football because I was getting more and more depressed, even though I wouldn’t open up to anyone about that for many years still.

I don’t remember sports being a huge part of my life for a few years after that, but in 2011 I discovered MMA, and the UFC in particular, and it would come to define my weekends for the next decade.

My entryway was The Ultimate Fighter season 12, when the first episode was uploaded to the torrent site I used for TV. I remembered an online friend having mentioned it some years before, and I checked it out.

I immediately fell in love with the sport. Within one year of downloading that first episode on a whim, I had watched all seasons of The Ultimate Fighter up to that point, every UFC event that had been staged by that point, and every event from other MMA organizations, such as PRIDE, DREAM, WEC, and Sengoku. All the ones available through certain means that is (piracy).

It became an obsession. From that point until late 2020 I would stay up till 7AM pretty much every Sunday morning so I could watch the mainly US based UFC events live.

The sport and the organization grew immensely during this time. From around twenty to twenty five events per year, to nearly fifty by the time I stopped caring about the sport. There were also other organizations, such as Strikeforce, Bellator and the PFL putting on events I’d watch as well.

The rest of the week went by reading articles and listening to several hour long podcasts about the sport. At one point I made the calculation that with the events and the podcasts, I was consuming 36 hours of MMA media every week. I decided to cut down, and I quit a few of the podcasts, only for my favorite podcast to expand its schedule to two pods a week. The dedication I had to the sport took a lot of time.

Being a fan of MMA and the UFC in particular became harder and harder as the Trump years progressed. More and more fighters openly supported the guy. The whole sport took on a fascist sheen to me.

I also rekindled my love for European football during the decade, and fell in love with the NFL and American football as well. During the NFL season I would stay up till 5AM Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, and 7AM on Saturday. It was a ridiculous thing to do! Why did I choose to live like that? I was severely depressed and sports were a great way to feel something else for a few hours.

Sports became so important for me that I would use any excuse to not hang out with my friends on Saturday night, so instead I could watch the UFC events live.

The sport, and the biggest organization, became more and more toxic in my eyes, although it probably always had elements of it present that I turned a blind eye to. Dana White, the UFC president, spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of Donald Trump in 2016, and it was a really icky moment.

White embraced Trump in the years that followed, and Trump went to UFC events, and many of the competitors also went full MAGA, and it became such a major turnoff for me that when I got a girlfriend in 2020, and staying up alone to watch live sports in the middle of the night made less sense, I quit the sport completely.

At first I introduced my girlfriend to the sport, and we watched events on replay on the Fight Pass app on Sundays for a while.

She also liked the sport, for it is amazing to watch, but the toxicity of the politics in the sport became too much for me. I cancelled my subscription and refused to download any more events. She still tells me she misses watching it on Sundays sometimes.

It has shocked me how easy it was to quit the sport that was my main obsession for close to a decade. No one I talk to anymore follows the sport, none of the people I follow on social media these days post about it, and whenever a headline from the MMA/UFC world ends up in front of me, it is completely foreign to me.

The only thing that makes sense is that Conor McGregor is still out there allegedly sexually assaulting women according to numerous lawsuits and Dana White doing more fascist stuff. He also spoke at the 2020 RNC to support Donald Trump yet again.

I used to be able to list the official Top 10 lists in every weight class from memory at one point, but I don't know anything at all about who is even champion at any weight now. And I feel great about that.

My American football and NFL dalliance was more short lived. Like a lot of Europeans I would watch a Super Bowl now and then, but when I noticed one of my streaming services had the Norwegian rights to the NFL, I started watching when I couldn’t sleep.

I watched pretty much every Monday Night and Thursday Night Football game during the 2018 and 2019 seasons, and when it was possible, I’d spend my Sundays in front of the TV screen for NFL RedZone from 7PM until the end of Sunday Night Football at 5AM.

Again, this is a completely insane way to live your life as a Norwegian. What was I thinking? Was my life really so awful that this was the best option for me at that time? Well, yes.

When the 2020 regular season started, I had gotten a girlfriend and it made less sense to stay up all night to watch large men do amazing feats of athleticism multiple times a week. I kept watching RedZone on Sundays for a while, but soon it was back to just watching Super Bowls. Last year I didn’t even do that. Not planning to watch the one in a month’s time either, but it could happen (It did not happen).

When I was a child, I watched whatever my dad watched, winter sports, handball, European football, the Olympics. Only football still holds my interest. I can watch the other sports if they’re on, but I don’t seek them out or read about them.

An important aspect of liking sports is the connection it gives you with other sports fans, but perhaps more importantly, with older family members.

My dad and I have a good relationship, and we can talk about anything, luckily, but the thing that always comes up and always sparks the biggest back and forth is football. It’s a nice and important part of life between fathers and sons. Sports shouldn’t be discounted as mere masculine, aggro cultures, it has real value to society.

When I grew up, the dominant team in Norwegian football was Rosenborg, our regional powerhouse, so I of course became a fan like my dad. I was born in 1989, and Rosenborg won the Eliteserien (top division) title 13 years in a row, from 1992-2004 in my childhood. They’ve won it 7 more times since then, having the Norwegian record of 26 league titles. They’ve also won the Norwegian cup a joint-record 12 times.

Growing up, they used to play in the Champions League every year, which is pretty much unheard of for Norwegian teams, or teams from smaller nations around Europe in general these days. Those nights were special. Dad even took me to Lerkendal, the home stadium, on at least one occasion, to see us play Club Brugge from Belgium. I still see foreign fans remember Rosenborg “being in the Champions League all the time back in the day” on social media whenever Norwegian football is mentioned.

In later years I’ve paid less attention to Norwegian football, I don’t follow it any closer than I do many other European leagues, but I also hope Norwegian teams do well in Europe, even traditional “enemies” that I’m supposed to hate as a Rosenborg fan.

I understand rivalries, and certainly hate some clubs, but I don’t feel as strongly about traditional enemies of my favorite clubs like most fans do. I’ve worked a lot on developing empathy over the last decade or so, and I guess that makes me capable of, if not sharing their joy, appreciating fans of rival clubs doing well.

My younger brother, dad and I went to a few games at Lerkendal a couple times around 2018-19, and most recently my brothers and I got tickets to a game for dad’s 70th birthday, and we had a very nice day in Trondheim, even though the result was poor.

The dominant team in English football during the 1990’s and 2000’s was of course Manchester United, and I have a great shame in being a supporter of theirs, due to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and other Norwegians playing for them in my youth.

My dad has always been a Liverpool supporter, and rooting for Manchester United as they were successful and Liverpool were miserable was just a way of poking fun at dad as a kid.

By 2005 I’d changed teams and was a Liverpool fan like dad and my little brother for that special night in Istanbul, when Liverpool beat AC Milan in the Champions League final to lift their fifth European crown.

I don’t remember being a fan of any type of sports in my teens, and I remember falling out of love with football completely around the time I stopped playing with my youth team when I was 14. I followed football much more casually in the years after that.

As previously mentioned, what got me into sports again was an MMA reality show, and even though the sport has changed, I’ve been reading about sports every day for close to 15 years now.

When my favorite MMA writer started working for The Athletic, and offered me a deal with a cheaper subscription for my first year, I jumped on it, and I read between three and ten or so articles from The Athletic every day for 5 years until I decided not to renew my subscription in the summer of 2024. Only football articles for most of that time.

Their social media also became a daily source of news, and I stayed on Twitter an extra 6 months just to get the latest news and articles from them until my subscription ended and I could delete Twitter without missing anything.

They’ve since started posting on Bluesky, so my home page on the Bluesky app is now a football feed dominated by The Athletic itself and writers who work for them. And I still follow their YouTube channels for podcasts and analysis.

I realize a lot of people don’t care about sports, and this whole essay might be the least interesting one in this collection for most of my readers, for which I’m sorry, I guess? But sports are incredibly important, both for men, families, and society at large. There is also growing interest in women’s sport, both among traditional fans and newer fans, which is great.

I’m not a typical football fan, in that I’ve changed favorite teams a couple of times, and I’m willing to root for other teams than my own too, if they’re having a good season. This is outrageous to most football fans, and it could get me hanged (theoretically).

I think a lot of younger fans might be more like me though, more fans of certain players than of teams, and more open to rooting for teams doing well than the team their dad and granddad supported. “Fair weather fans” traditionalists will call us.

But as a Norwegian, I’m not born into a certain geographical area that means I have to support Southampton, Aston Villa, Luton, or Grimsby. I don’t have to support Borussia Dortmund, Eintracht Frankfurt, or Union Berlin. I get to choose whichever team I want, and I get to choose a new team every season if I want to. Sacrilege, most sports fans will say, and that’s fair.

I fell in love with Liverpool and English football again during Brendan Rodgers time as manager, which led to the Klopp era, which was magic. I think even rival fans will acknowledge that time was special, both for the club and the Premier League at large.

That whole ordeal with the Super League though… That killed my love affair with Liverpool, and four years later I’m still not over it.

The European Super League was an attempt by the richest clubs in Europe to kill European football as we know it. They wanted to kill competition, and ensure their dominance over the financial aspect of European football forever, by making a closed league with very limited chances for less traditionally rich or successful clubs to ever compete or progress.

I’m not going to relitigate the whole saga here, but Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, happily signed up to this farce, willing to kill fair competition and European football forever for a profit. I am not ever going to forgive them for that, and as long as they remain owners, there is no chance of me embracing Liverpool fully again, and any successes in the years since then have been with an asterisk in my own enjoyment.

English fans in particular, but fans all over Europe raised hell and got out in the streets and held large protests as soon as the European Super League (ESL) plans were announced, and the fans won. The greedy owners lost, and have to struggle through being merely obscenely rich instead of… extra obscenely rich I guess. It was a dark idea, and it still lingers over European football to this day.

Speaking of European football finances, it’s gotten too expensive for me to actually watch the games. I think the current 24/25 season is the fourth season where all I can do is watch highlights on YouTube the day after games, and the occasional game with my little brother and/or dad. It has become ridiculously expensive to be a sports fan in the last few years. And I’m not in any position to comment on ticket prices for local fans, but they are bad and getting worse.

Clubs will have revenues of 500 million plus Euros and still raise ticket prices that will hurt their fans and the increased revenue they gain will merely be a rounding error in their own accounts. Obscene.

I have a lot more time to read books and in general do more things now that I’ve been priced out of actually watching football though. Even when I could afford it, it was so expensive that I felt I needed to watch every game to justify paying, which is close to six hours every Saturday. Weekday matches and Friday and Sunday games come on top of that.

Instead I would spend several hours every day reading about the sport, live updates, scores, and analysis. Now I read less about it, but still check the scores and live updates, and watch highlights, interviews and analysis on YouTube. It still takes several hours every week to keep up with football, even at a slightly larger distance than I used to engage with it.

As I’m editing this essay, yesterday was the 2025 League Cup final in England, and Liverpool were playing. They lost 2-1 to Newcastle, who won their first major trophy in 70 years, and against any other team, I’d be happy for them. Instead I was depressed and bummed out for several hours after the final whistle.

In the evening I watched the new Amazon documentary about the Klopp era at Liverpool, and got to relive some emotional highs, so I got the whole gamut of feelings that sports bring us in one day.

Sports documentaries are something I only started engaging with and watching a few short years ago, and I find they are mostly good. You can get a season’s worth of ups and downs in a few episodes watched over a few days and it can be exhilarating.

I have this app for sports scores and results, called Flashscore, that I first used for just the main games in the big leagues I followed, but when the pandemic shut all sports down, along with shutting down the whole world of course, I started following Faroe Islands and Belarusian football, because that was the only football being played anywhere in the world.

When football returned as the pandemic cooled down and we started ignoring covid, this led to me checking off more and more leagues to follow, and now I pay some attention to pretty much every top league in Europe, and several lower divisions in many countries too, and some Asian and American leagues as well. I have found out a couple times that the maximum amount of games the app lets you mark off per day is 500. As in I’ve found more than 500 games I wanted to know the score of on a single day on a couple of occasions. Wild.

Why do I feel the need to pay attention to Croatian third division teams? Bulgarian second division? Do I need to see who is fighting for promotion in the second division on the Faroe Islands? Probably not! But it’s been almost five years of looking at results for some teams a 30 something year old Norwegian has no business even knowing exists. I realize it’s kind of weird, and I can’t explain it.

As for my favorite team since the ESL ordeal, it has been Brighton and Hove Albion. I’ve been paying attention to them since they joined the Premier League, paid more attention when they hired Graham Potter, who was head coach during Ostersunds' ascent up Swedish football (sort of a local team, right across the border from where I live), and it’s been a love affair ever since. They seem to be doing things the right way. They have a seemingly and hopefully sound financial and sporting plan and have been steadily improving ever since joining the Premier League, even through losing major players and managers to bigger teams.

And it’s more frustrating to cheer for a team that might lose 7-0 to Nottingham Forest one week, then beat Chelsea 3-0 the next, as opposed to just following Liverpool who win pretty much every week this year. I’m not going to tell you which is better or more “real”, just that it’s different.

Brighton might get European qualification again this year, and in five years they might go down! Look at Leicester City, Premier League and FA Cup winners, consistently finishing in the top 5, then a few years later, relegated, promoted, and looking to go down again this year. It’s not easy being a smaller club in England.

And these smaller English clubs are among the 30 richest clubs in all of world football too, so doing well as an underdog in the Premier League is relative. It’s now normal that AFC Bournemouth are buying players AC Milan can’t afford. Wild.

I’ve also gotten to go on a wild ride as a fan of Forest Green Rovers, a team I first heard about when they were in the National League (the fifth tier of English football), and I was paying close attention and calling myself a fan by the time they won League Two (fourth tier), then got two horrific seasons of losing every week, being relegated twice, all the way back to the National League and churning through managers over those two catastrophic seasons.

It was quite an experience to go through as a fan who has mostly experienced successful seasons for all teams I’ve ever supported.

What makes sports important is the community it creates. There are millions of men who only express, and probably only allow themselves to feel, emotions with regards to sports. We might not be able to tell our kids and wife we love them, but we can show passion when someone scores a goal or a point. This probably isn’t a comfort or even helpful to loved ones, but it is a place one can start. Men need therapy!

So many men only express passion and love and sadness and anger when football season is on. But it is a way for sons to connect with their dads. Daughters as well. There is probably academic research into all of this.

Through sports, millions of people get to experience the highs of wins and lows of losses each week, and it is meaningful. It gives people something to talk about with friends, family and co-workers. It lets people feel something, in a world that is often gray and hard to deal with.

A huge problem in sports these days is the growing influence of gambling and its repercussions on fans. In America, and in Europe, sports betting is advertised directly through the leagues and TV broadcasts, right into the living room. Millions of people lose money on sports every day.

It is my opinion that gambling should be illegal, I don’t see any positives it brings that could even begin to outweigh the many negatives. Lives are ruined every day due to sports gambling, homes lost, families torn apart.

Yes, it can be fun and relatively unproblematic in the right setting, but having the apps on our phones with constant buzzing about moving lines and open bets for each play is self-evidently not a good thing.

And the Premier League, and the clubs themselves directly benefit from sports gambling advertising. From 2026 front of shirt sponsors won’t be allowed, but gambling sites will still be allowed as sleeve sponsors. And for many clubs, these sponsorships are important revenue that is hard to find otherwise.

Money in general is a problem in sports in my opinion. It really is big business, and this takes away from the core of athleticism and joy that it’s supposed to represent.

I might’ve spent too much time talking about sports here for my readers who might mostly not care about sports, and I might be too “fair weather” for the actual sports fans, so all this might have been a bad idea to put down in writing. But hopefully it has meant something to someone reading it!