Hacker: Sports fans, unite!

Sooner or later, into every man’s life will come that painful day when he must confront the realisation that he will never become a professional sportsman. For me, that realisation came not long ago, on a rugby pitch at Inverleith Gardens during an intramural match. The smallest, slowest member of the opposing team was in possession and running towards me—our last line of defense, standing five metres off the try line—when he dummied a pass, then rolled the ball down his back and reverse-kicked it over my head, before catching it on the full and touching down to score.

Thus passed my dream: I would, in fact, not be leading Harlequins to Heineken Cup glory after all.

Remarkable though it sounds—along with the try, and my delusion—experiences such as this are the bricks-and-mortar of sport’s foundations. In the wake of the City of Manchester Stadium’s transformation into Middle Eastlands, much has been written to the effect that football is a “billionaire’s playground;” but it is a truth universal to all sport that the fans make the game.

I’m not speaking about the much maligned "prawn sandwich" fans, who unfortunately make up the majority of attendances at professional sport matches, be they football, rugby, tennis, basketball, hockey, gridiron, baseball, what have you. When tickets for a Premiership game at Manchester United go for £48 each, prices rise for Red Sox home games from $25 to $125 over the course of three seasons, and international rugby fixtures between Scotland and England are virtually impossible to get into, the wealthy will fill the better part of the stands.

Nor am I talking about the lionised "genuine" fans, who travel to every game, following their team regardless of dizzying success or a desperate plunge into the lower divisions. These are the sorts who postpone weddings which clash with cup finals, write the fans’ columns in the red-tops, run the supporters’ associations and the websites, and generally find their way onto Football Focus. They sometimes have tattoos that end with “...til I die.”

When I speak of fans underpinning the game they support, I’m talking about people like you, and me. We matter most, because there’s more of us than the other kinds, though we might have neither the cash nor the committment. We do have the numbers, and that makes us the market.

The beauty of professional sport is that it has to court the market. Regardless of how many millions, even billions, get pumped into sport, what matters will always be what comes out. Football clubs clamber over each other to reach the top of the rich list. Their wealth comes primarily from television deals and merchandising.

That means that we—the would-be Cristiano Ronaldos, Danny Ciprianis and Freddie Flintoffs that never will be—are the true power-brokers of modern sport. We buy the odd strip and take in the odd game, whether in the stands or in the pub; we flock to The Guardian’s fantasy football site and pick unlikely starting XVs courtesy of the BBC. We are the elephant in the corner of every boardroom of every club in every sport, worldwide.

Of course, our power is almost entirely meaningless; there is no way to represent the will of millions of casual sports fans. But though it might not feel like it very often these days, it is in fact all for us – even, in some small way, by us.

Therefore, freshers: when you are solicited this week by an intramural or university team, embrace your inner sporting failure and join; enjoy the spectacle that we’ve created. There’s no one at the controls of the gravy train, and it’s picking up speed.