Yeah, I guess the everyday users are invested in the area so wouldn't leave their mess. For people just popping by, they think it's someone else's problem and not their own.
Today's Pet Peeve has been bothering me for awhile. It comes up a lot in the comment sections of various sites where I follow auto racing, but its applicable pretty much everywhere.
I keep seeing people say "My favorite league is a sport," versus this other similar league that you love which "is just entertainment." Its pretentious in my opinion, and always intended as an insult.
I'm pretty sure that all sports are supposed to be entertaining, otherwise they wouldn't invite an audience to watch in the first place. Its a basic truth that all sports fall in and out of various levels of favor over time. Sometimes you're on top, sometimes you're no longer cool. And many sports where the athletes do incredible things simply are not easily marketable or as entertaining to watch as they are to participate in. In 2024 we have unprecedented access to pretty much everything going on in the world. As a result everything is changing faster than ever, trying to keep up and keep itself alive.
The world and civilization are old, but legally speaking, our modern age is still pretty young. The oldest, official, still-existing sports leagues only go back to the mid 1800's, but for the most part didn't get started until the early and mid 20th century. Humans have been competing athletically for thousands of years. I guess the point I'm getting at is that we're in uncharted territory. It can be difficult for we mere mortals to accept the changes that take place during our short lives in order to keep these leagues alive in an era of unprecedented potential growth/exposure and financial interests.
I agree, but whilst also maintaining that some sports drift too far away from the sports side of it to get closer to the entertainment. There are sports that need sexing up to be appealing to the masses, sports that are hugely enjoyable to play in but not that great to watch, which need to do more. But there are others that having been appealing to the masses for decades, or even over a century, that just don't need to do it.
Take football (soccer) for example. It's been huge in Europe since the 1800s, along with the traffic, it's the go-to topic of conversation in England when two male strangers meet. Millions of people instinctively think you're a bit weird if you say "I don't like football". And yet they won't just leave it alone. They keep refusing to just let it be a sport, it's now all about brands and corporate entities whoring themselves out to billionaires so that they can be the team who pays the highest wages and therefore win the most trophies. It's in the governing bodies gifts to stop all that, but they won't, because they want it to happen. Rich clubs paying the most money attract the biggest name player which attract the bigger audiences. And it's not the English audiences they are after, they've got them sewn up, they're after the foreign markets. But then that just ruins the domestic leagues in those countries. The English Premier League is more popular in some countries than the country's own league.
Just bin it all off, introduce a salary cap, make following the sport cheaper and who cares if people in Estonia go back to watching Estonia football, or if people in Lagos, Nigeria stop wearing Man Utd and Liverpool shirts? It didn't matter in the 20th century, it shouldn't matter now.
"Millions of people instinctively think you're a bit weird if you say "I don't like football"
^^
I'm glad you went there with your last post. For many years I've found these alleged "national obsessions" and other self reinforcing stereotypes that countries and continents have with certain things (sports, food, the arts, and more....) to be both intriguing (in terms of anthropology) and endlessly annoying.
In sports, for example, regardless of how big any event is... we should always remember that more people DON'T watch than DO watch.
Also, data collection on popularity is really weird right now. Once upon a time they by and large gave us estimates based on polling data. Now we have more ability than ever to generate accurate statistics, however simply knowing how many people watched official broadcasts no longer tells us the whole story. Meanwhile, we have streaming services ect... being deliberately secretive about viewership data.
Today's Pet-Peeve: Videos designed to be "motivational."
I rarely react to them the way I'm probably expected to react. I think people would probably say that I'm too cynical or just looking for excuses for my own failures. But so often when I hear these "motivational" stories, or advice given, all I can see is the holes in the story and the advantages the people in the stories had but seemed completely oblivious to.
One half serious example - People on reality TV shows constantly talk about how they quit their job and risked everything to follow their dream to the successful business they now own. And then you find out they were a practicing lawyer or worked on Wall Street.
