Football and American Identity by Frank Hoffmann Gerhard Falk Martin J Manning

Author:Frank Hoffmann, Gerhard Falk, Martin J Manning [Frank Hoffmann, Gerhard Falk, Martin J Manning]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Sports & Recreation, General, Football
ISBN: 9781135427146
Google: 2WZHAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-08T04:51:39+00:00

REGIONAL AND GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES AMONG FOOTBALL FANS

In the United States supporters of a football team do not necessarily come only from the large city in which any particular football team is located. Televison and other media help to gather support for football teams from many areas of the country, so that support for all NFL teams is national. The salary cap has minimized major performance differences among NFL teams such as those frequently seen in hockey and baseball.13

Although football has many adherents in all parts of the country, there are regional differences in the amount of attention football receives. Unlike people in the South or the Midwest, most Westerners do not construct their lives around football. In the South many people fit their weekend schedules around football games, whether the team of interest is a high school team, a college team, a professional team, or some combination of these. In the West, the football game is only one part of what people do on the weekend; it is not the center of attention or the focus of everything done on Saturday and/or Sunday.

For that reason the University of Utah had a great deal of difficulty selling enough tickets to pay for their new stadium. In fact, some games are so poorly attended at Utah that only 15,000 of 33,000 ticket holders come to watch the game. Failure to regularly fill football stadiums is common in the West. This is particularly true of college football games and has been observed at the University of California, Stanford, Arizona State, and Colorado State University. One explanation for this is that the West is chiefly populated by people who have come from other states and who therefore do not have the same intensity of local pride as can be observed in the South and the Midwest. This is most significant for college teams who lack the advertising and entertainment resources available to the professionals.

In the Midwest and the South the stadiums fill up early. Many Southern and Midwestern tailgaters arrive as early as Thursday night. This is true of University of Tennessee games in Knoxville as well as for fans in Gainesville, Florida (home of the University of Florida), Ann Arbor, Michigan, and in Lincoln, Nebraska.14

It appears that the overall interest in watching football games may be fading with the rise of the first generation of the twenty-first century. According to a poll commissioned by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers of America, the number of youths age twelve to seventeen who describe themselves as ardent sports fans dropped 3.6 percent since 1999. A study by Nielsen Media Research found a 3 percent decline among the number of young NFL viewers. One reason for this decline may be found in the longer seasons most sports occupy, featuring many more games than played in the past. In addition, more sports are available to watch. Now golf and NASCAR compete with football, as do “extreme” sports. These other sports can be watched on almost any day at any time, in contrast to football games, which can be seen almost exclusively on weekends.

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