The datafication of athletes is increasingly central to sports fandom. Statistics in sports are not new — the box score, for instance, originated in 1858 as a means to track the performance of baseball players — but they have never before been so dominant in our sporting milieu. Fantasy sports, once a fringe activity championed by a small collective of board- and card-gamers, has blossomed in the 21st century, drawing 62.5 million participants in 2022 in the U.S. and Canada alone. Sports betting, illegal (if only technically) in all 50 U.S. states in 2018, is now permissible in all but 10. The Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association estimated in 2023 that about a quarter of American adults engage in the practice. 

What do these trends tell us? Certainly, that sports fandom is not as different from media fandom as one might assume. Sports fandom is often lauded for its masculinity, dichotomized as macho relative to ‘geek’ fandom of media like Dallas or Star Trek.

These fans were agents of cultural produc- tion. They didn’t just watch Star Trek on TV; they created zines packed with original Spock fanfiction. They crafted fan econo- mies. Geek fans were, as early fan scholar and USC Annenberg professor Henry Jenkins noted in a seminal work, “textual poachers” more than mere observers, they are participants in the making of culture and meaning.

The archetypal sports fan of today has evolved to be more participatory. They might not be writing fanfic, but the modern sports fan isn’t just sitting back and watching the big game on Sunday, either. Extracurriculars drafting your fantasy football team or crafting parlays, interacting with other fans and even players through new media — have become almost as important, if not more so, than the game itself.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT WE STILL DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT IT MEANS FOR US AS A SOCIETY THAT OBJECTIFICATION AND DATAFICATION ARE BECOMING BORDERLINE INESCAPABLE FACETS OF SPORTS FANDOM.

New media have empowered sports fans to become more connected. But the increased importance of metrics and statistics in sports culture is also troubling. We’ve ramped up the surveillance and the use of data in our performance of our fandom. The athletic body, established from the early days of sports as a site for the mapping of cultural and gendered ideals, has become even more complicated by our insistence on its objectification. 

There’s a dissonance, then, between the hyperconnectivity offered by new media and the coldness of the bio-valuation of athletes that has become a central affordance of our new sports fan practice. Fans are only one link in that chain — sporting leagues and gambling companies like DraftKings and FanDuel are among the actors responsible for this changing sports and media ecosystem. 

The problem is that we still don’t really know what it means for us as a society that objectification and datafication are becoming borderline inescapable facets of sports fandom. What kind of fandom is employed when we watch a game not because we enjoy the team, but because we have money on a player getting over 8.5 rebounds? How have the changes in sports fandom changed our relationships to each other? And given the rapid professionalization of college sports, won’t someone think of the children?

I don’t mean to poke fun at the moral panic of it all. These are interesting questions that are difficult for scholars to answer simply because we can’t produce research fast enough to keep up with the industry. Legislation on sports betting is constantly changing. The COVID-19 pandemic completely skewed how fans, athletes and brands interact on social media. Student athletes couldn’t even benefit from name, image and likeness (NIL) deals just five years ago. 

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing the work to interrogate the world we are co-creating. What kind of fans do we want to be? What kind of journalists? What industry standards can we set to ensure we’re engaging with sports data and new media meaningfully?

The future of sports fandom relies on us engaging these and other questions about humanity and subjectivity. 

Nikki Thomas is a journalist, cat mom, Philly sports fan, and PhD candidate at USC Annenberg. Her research centers on the emergent social dynamics of sports fandom as informed by new media and datafication, with a particular focus on how the American sporting environment has redefined the relationships between fans and athletes.