Fandom can really bring people together. Science is starting to measure it
If you have ever watched a big game in a packed stadium, a pub or even a room full of people you barely know, you will probably recognise the feeling. For a couple of hours, strangers have something in common. They celebrate together, complain together and somehow find themselves talking as though they have known each other for much longer.
We tend to accept that as part of sport. What we know much less about is what is actually happening underneath it.
Researchers at Harvard Kennedy School are now trying to find out.
Professor Todd Rogers and doctoral researcher Audrey Feldman have launched the Fandom and Social Connection Initiative to study whether sports fandom can strengthen social connection and, perhaps more interestingly, whether those effects can be measured using behavioural science.
It is surprisingly unexplored territory. Harvard reports that only around one in every 800 articles in leading social-science journals is about sport, despite nearly three-quarters of Americans following a professional sports team and many describing that fandom as an important part of who they are.
That gap between the scale of fandom and how little we understand about it is what makes the research so interesting.
When supporting the same team changes the relationship
One of Rogers and Feldman's early experiments looked at what happens when people encounter someone whose political and cultural views are very different from their own.
You might expect those differences to dominate the interaction. Yet when participants discovered that the other person supported the same sports team, they became more favourable towards them.
According to the researchers, that shared fandom had a stronger effect than having the same race or ethnicity, education or home region. Only shared religion came close.
That does not mean football somehow makes political disagreement disappear, and the researchers are not claiming that it does. What it suggests is that a shared identity can alter the way we perceive someone we might otherwise regard primarily as an opponent.
Anyone who follows sport has probably experienced a version of this. You can meet somebody whose background, politics or life looks very different from your own, discover that they support the same club and suddenly have years of shared reference points to talk about.
There is already something between you.
Why might fandom be so good at doing this?
Rogers describes sport as a kind of social infrastructure, which feels particularly relevant at a time when many of the institutions that once brought people together, from local clubs to churches and political organisations, play a smaller role in everyday life.
Sport is unusual because it creates both identity and repetition. You do not simply declare yourself a supporter once. You return every week, follow the same story, experience the same highs and lows, and often do it alongside the same people.
Daniel Wann, a long-standing researcher in the psychology of fandom, describes shared fandom as being like a shared photo album.
It is a useful way of thinking about it. Two supporters who have never met can still remember where they were for the same final, the same last-minute goal or the same disastrous season. They may even know roughly where the other person is likely to be when the next big game comes around.
There is some evidence that this connection may go deeper than metaphor. Research discussed by the Harvard team suggests that spectators can show physiological synchronisation as they react to the emotional peaks and troughs of a game.
So when fans say they experienced something together, there may be a measurable element of truth to it.
That is where the science becomes important
The Harvard team is now moving beyond simply observing fandom and testing whether it can actively increase connection.
Rogers says some of their experiments have encouraged people to watch sport with others and found that participants subsequently felt more socially connected, with effects that persisted for weeks.
That is an important step because it begins to move fandom away from something we simply recognise intuitively and towards something we can examine scientifically.
And that distinction matters.
We are very good at measuring the commercial side of fandom. We can count audiences, followers, subscriptions, ticket sales, merchandise, viewing time and social engagement with extraordinary precision.
What we are much less good at measuring is what all of that activity means to the person experiencing it.
This is the part that interests us at Thetafan
Someone who watches every match is clearly engaged, but that does not necessarily tell us how strongly the team forms part of their identity, how much they trust the community around it or how important those relationships have become in their life.
Equally, someone who watches less frequently may have a much deeper emotional connection because the team is bound up with family, place, memories or belonging.
Traditional engagement data struggles to see that difference because it mostly measures what people do.
Thetafan is interested in measuring more of the relationship underneath that behaviour, including characteristics such as fandom, trust, influence, dependency, loyalty and safety, and how those measures change as people continue to interact with content, communities and increasingly AI.
Research like the work being undertaken at Harvard matters because it starts to give us better scientific evidence for something that fans have probably understood instinctively for a very long time: these relationships can have effects outside the stadium.
They can influence who we talk to, who we feel connected to and even how we respond to somebody we fundamentally disagree with.
If those effects are genuine and persistent, then simply counting fans is not enough.
We need better ways of understanding what being a fan actually does to us.