There was a time when Americans looked across the Atlantic and congratulated themselves on the supposed superiority of our sports culture.
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European soccer fans, we were told, were the unruly ones. They were the hooligans. They were the ones who turned passion into menace, tribal loyalty into street fights and defeat into disorder. In 1994, when the World Cup was held in Central Florida, the local sheriff at the time even tried to commission a military tank to keep order in downtown Orlando.
Back then, American sports fans liked to believe we knew how to behave. We booed, sure. We heckled. We argued in bars and on talk radio. But we imagined there was still a line.
Lately, that line has grown harder to find.
The contrast has been impossible to ignore this summer. The World Cup is unfolding again across the United States, and the country has been filled with international supporters wrapped in flags, singing songs, marching through streets, gathering in fan zones, celebrating victories and mourning defeats. They have brought color, noise, rhythm and joy. They have cheered for their countries with a kind of full-throated devotion that feels both ancient and innocent.
And for the most part, they have done it beautifully.
After matches, fans from different countries have mingled, taken pictures, traded chants and celebrated the strange privilege of being together in a foreign place for a global tournament. The atmosphere has felt less like combat than carnival. It has reminded us that sports, at their best, can be a passport. They can make strangers visible to one another.
Meanwhile, some corners of American fandom have looked smaller, angrier and uglier.
During the NBA Finals, viral images and reports of confrontations between New York Knicks and San Antonio Spurs fans offered a depressing reminder of how quickly pride can curdle into hostility. These were not ancient enemies. This was not some centuries-old feud passed through generations. It was basketball between a big-market team and a small-market team. And yet, some people treated the opposing jersey as an invitation to fight belligerently.
Then came the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills just a couple of days ago. Golf used to be the refuge from all this. It was one of our last bastions of civility and decorum. Fans applauded good shots even when they came from the wrong player. They understood silence as part of the drama. They knew that a golfer standing over a putt was not an enemy to be rattled but an athlete confronting one of the loneliest tests in sports.
That spirit was harder to find on Sunday as Wyndham Clark tried to win a national championship, while portions of the crowd seemed eager not merely to support Scottie Scheffler but to see Clark collapse. They cheered mistakes. They jeered. They treated another man’s unraveling as entertainment. Multiple spectators had to be removed from the course.
What has happened to us?
The easy answer is social media, and it is not wrong. We now live inside a machinery of mockery. Every missed putt, blown coverage, bad call and defeated fan base becomes content. The algorithm does not reward restraint. It rewards cruelty. The angrier the post, the faster it travels. The uglier the insult, the more it gets shared.
Eventually, people begin performing in public the way they behave online. The arena becomes a comment section with beer sales.
But politics has done its share of damage, too. We have spent years watching public figures turn insult into strategy and obnoxiousness into a brand. The erosion of civility is visible even in places that once demanded a minimum level of respect. Not long ago, a State of the Union address was one of the few remaining civic rituals where political opponents could at least share a room and acknowledge the dignity of the office, even while disagreeing with the occupant.
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Today, members of Congress routinely heckle, jeer and treat the State of the Union address like a Florida-Florida State football game. Whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican, the message to the public is the same: if elected leaders no longer feel obligated to show basic respect to one another in moments of national significance, why should anyone else?
And whether you support Donald Trump or oppose him, it is difficult to deny that he has intensified the public discourse. For more than a decade, Americans have watched a major political figure communicate through insults, derogatory nicknames, public feuds, and social media attacks. Many of his supporters readily acknowledge that Trump can be rude, but they often excuse it because they believe he is fighting for their side.
That may be the most consequential lesson of all. Once people decide that boorish behavior is acceptable when directed at the “other team,” it becomes easier to justify everywhere else. Politics becomes tribal. Then sports become tribal. Then everyday life becomes tribal.
We increasingly define ourselves not by what we support but by what we oppose.
That mindset is now visible in our sporting culture.
You can see it in the endless stream of social media posts celebrating another fan base’s misery. You can feel it in the hostility that occasionally erupts between strangers whose only disagreement is the logo on a jersey.
Of course, this doesn’t mean sports were once some golden age of perfect civility. Philadelphia fans threw snowballs at Santa Claus. Baseball stadiums have always had hecklers. And who will ever forget the deranged Alabama football fan who poisoned the iconic ancient oak trees at Auburn’s Toomer’s Corner?
But in the past, it seems, we knew where the line was that should not be crossed.
Today, like everything else, the line itself is up for debate.
Perhaps what makes this trend feel so disappointing is that sports once served as one of the few places where Americans with vastly different backgrounds could gather around a common experience. The game itself was the point. For three hours, politics, social status, and ideology often took a back seat to the drama unfolding on the field.
Sports were an escape.
Now they increasingly resemble everything we were trying to escape from.
The irony is that sports are at their best when they teach us valuable life lessons. They teach resilience after failure, respect and sportsmanship toward your opponent, grace in victory and dignity in defeat.
The golfer standing over a six-foot putt is not your enemy.
The fan wearing another team’s jersey is not your enemy.
The point guard who misses or makes the game-winning shot is not your enemy.
They’re simply part of a game.
This is the lesson we need to rediscover.
Because if sports become just another arena for anger and contempt, we will have lost one of the few institutions that still has the power to bring people together.
Ironically, as the World Cup unfolds across America, the fans we once stereotyped as hooligans are showing us a better way.
The question is whether we’re paying attention.
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Email me at [email protected]. Hit me up on social media @BianchiWrites and listen to my radio show “Game On” every weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com/listen.
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