The way we think about watching sports is going through a rapid transformation. Attendance is down across most leagues but TV ratings are up. Fans seem to be more wrapped up in the sagas of individual athletes than they are in following their favorite teams.
With the proliferation of HDTVs, mobile devices, Twitter and fantasy leagues, we’re always connected to sports. Today, we don’t even bat an eyelash when fans in Seattle cheer for Tampa Bay quarterback Josh Freeman -- after all, he’s on their fantasy team.
The way we stay connected to athletes though Twitter and fantasy sports has allowed us to gain unprecedented access to their lives, and it’s changing our perception of who they are. In our celebrity-obsessed world, technology is our bridge to a new kind of personal relationship with our sports idols.
Skipping the Stadium
Shaquille O'Neal, one of the greatest marketers in modern sports, recently announced his retirement on Twitter. In that 10-second video, Shaq showed that despite his talents, he was a regular guy like us. Marketers have been trying to humanize athletes for years. When you can take athletes off their pedestals, you start to realize that beyond the money and tremendous athletic ability, many of them are not so different from us. For the first time, we have a direct outlet to almost all of them and they have a direct outlet to us.
The athlete in the Twitter age has almost complete control over how the public views him or her and it will likely make or break many endorsement contracts in the near future. Big money is involved, and while many athletes will seize upon this as an opportunity to let their personality shine, others will rise and fall with their own mistakes.
Getting Personal
While it’s nothing new to root for your favorite athlete from another town, it’s something new to be able to watch them whenever you want, follow them on Twitter and pick them third in your fantasy draft. In the past few years alone, we have witnessed a great migration of athletes who have busted out of the sports page and onto the entertainment and lifestyle scene.
These new technologies have continued to blur the lines between the athlete and the fan, placing average Janes and Joes on the field, in the lockeroom or smack-dab in the everyday lives of their favorite celebrity-athletes. We’ll always root for our favorite teams and we’ll cry when they lose, but technology is bringing us a new kind of personal relationship with the athletes we adore. It might just change our perception of what it means to be a fan.