Sports media does not only report on fans. It also gives fans a story to belong to. This article looks at what research says about fan identity, how coverage decides whose stories get told, and how online fan communities can build belonging and also enable abuse. The audience is large: in YouGov’s 2023 sports report, 67% of consumers surveyed said they follow sports regularly through media platforms.
Update, October 2026: The 2026 World Cup final drew a record U.S. audience of about 62.8 million across Fox and Telemundo, according to Axios, including about 23.9 million for Telemundo’s Spanish-language broadcast, per Sportcal. In our view, numbers like these show how many fans now meet a sport first through a screen rather than a stadium.
How Media Helps Build Fan Identity
Sports media routinely frames teams and players as underdogs, champions, heroes, or villains. In our view, those frames give fans a ready-made story to place themselves inside: a team portrayed as scrappy and hardworking can attract fans who see themselves that way.
Research on fan psychology shows why that matters. Daniel Wann, a psychologist who studies sports fans, defines team identification as the degree to which a fan feels a psychological connection to a team and sees its performance as personally relevant, as described by the Association for Psychological Science. In a 1992 study by Edward Hirt and colleagues, highly identified students who watched their college basketball team win rated the team’s future, their own task performance, and their own self-esteem higher than those who watched it lose.
The classic evidence is older. In a 1976 field study by Robert Cialdini and colleagues, students at seven universities wore school apparel more often after football wins than after non-wins. In a second study, 168 undergraduates were phoned and asked about the result of their team’s game. Those whose team had won used the word “we” more often than those whose team had not.
Students who said “we” about their team
Identification also seems to affect how fans judge others. Wann and Rick Grieve found in 2005, as described by the same APS report, that fans, especially fans of winning teams, judged opposing fans’ behavior more harshly than their own. Separately, Wann’s surveys of undergraduate fans linked stronger identification with less loneliness and higher collective self-esteem, though those results are correlational.
Who Gets Covered, and How
Coverage decides which athletes and fan communities become visible. The long-running research of Cheryl Cooky and Michael Messner on televised news and highlight shows, including ESPN’s SportsCenter, found that women’s sports received about 5% of airtime in 1989 and 5.1% in 1993. In the 2019 edition, reported by Purdue University, the figure was 5.4%, or 3.5% when coverage of the 2019 Women’s World Cup was removed.
Women’s sports share of airtime
In our view, a number that has barely moved in three decades matters for fan culture because coverage signals who counts as a real athlete and a real fan. It also helps explain why dismissive attitudes toward women’s sports persist, though the study measured coverage, not attitudes.
Online Communities: Belonging and Abuse
Online spaces have changed fan culture. Forums and social platforms let fans connect across borders, organize around causes, and hold teams and media accountable. They also make it easy for hostility to reach athletes directly.
FIFA’s Social Media Protection Service offers one measurement. At the 2023 Women’s World Cup, FIFA reported that one in five players, 152 in all, received targeted discriminatory, abusive, or threatening messages, per Fox Sports. The service analyzed 5.1 million posts and comments in 35 languages, and more than 400,000 comments were reported and hidden. Almost half of the verified abusive messages were homophobic, sexual, or sexist, and players at the women’s tournament were 29% more likely to be targeted than players at the 2022 men’s tournament.
Online fan spaces also raise familiar problems: misinformation, echo chambers that reinforce existing views, and pile-ons. In our view, none of these is unique to sports, but the intensity of fan identity makes them sharper there.
Media Literacy for Fans
Media literacy is the ability to access, evaluate, and create media. For fans, that comes down to a few habits:
- Notice the frame. Ask whether a story is presenting a player as a hero or villain, and what evidence supports it.
- Check the source. Look for the original reporting before sharing a claim about a player or team.
- Watch your own identification. The research above suggests strong identification can color how we judge results and rival fans.
- Use the report button. Abuse that targets players or fans is a problem for the whole community, not only its targets.
Our View
In our view, media and fans shape each other. Coverage hands fans stories and identities, and fans in turn decide which stories travel, online and in the stands. The research suggests identity is powerful: it can bring belonging and self-esteem, and it can also sharpen judgments of rivals and tolerate abuse. Fan culture is healthiest when fans can hold both thoughts at once.
VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep examining how sports media and fan culture shape each other.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.