The Tribal Advantage

My uncle Ray was from Long Island. He grew up there, went away to Michigan for college, then came home and spent his career as a schoolteacher. His brother had played football at Michigan in the 1950s, so the connection ran through the family, but Ray's life was in New York.

Except Ray was a Michigan man. Not a Michigan fan. A Michigan man. There is a difference, though I'm not sure I understood how big the difference was until I started thinking about him recently.

Ray could have lived another hundred years, and I don't think Michigan would have left him. Players left. Coaches left. Presidents left. The kids wearing the helmets were born, grew up, played four years, and disappeared while Ray kept wearing Michigan. Michigan got him when he was young and somehow became part of who he was.

That's one hell of a trick, and professional sports teams spend billions trying to do it. They build palaces, hire agencies, redesign logos, blast music at you between every play, create loyalty programs, and produce enough branded content to make you consider throwing your phone into the ocean. A university gives you a roommate.

I live in North Carolina now, in the Triangle, where three major universities sit close enough to one another to create a kind of permanent low-grade hostility. There is Duke, the elite private school filled with rich kids, Northeasterners, and future investment bankers who learned the word “summer” as a verb. There is Carolina, the great public university filled with smart kids and North Carolina kids who will politely explain why their school is better while pretending they aren't explaining why their school is better.

Then there is NC State. Engineers. Agriculture. Practical people. The guy who can actually fix the tractor while the Duke kid creates a financial model for the tractor, and the Carolina kid explains the tractor's historical significance.

These are stereotypes. Calm down. But they also explain why college sports are such a fascinating case study. Geography is built in. Generations of families attend the same schools. Kids grow up wanting to wear the uniform. Rivalries are inherited. Heroes change every four years, but the stories never stop accumulating. Long before the opening tip, almost every ingredient of belonging is already there.

One idea of who “we” are is playing against an idea of who “they” are. The players are almost incidental.

That's become particularly obvious now that college athletes move around like consultants chasing a better compensation package. Duke had a quarterback put together a stellar season and then leave for Miami, another school in the ACC. Duke fans did not follow him to Miami. They didn't order orange shirts and start researching South Beach. They got pissed and, I suspect, immediately looked for the Miami game on the schedule. Yesterday he was ours. Now he's theirs. Welcome to rivalry.

This is where college sports gets weird, particularly compared with professional sports. LeBron James can change teams and take an audience with him. Lionel Messi moves to Miami, and suddenly people on the other side of the planet own pink shirts. Cristiano Ronaldo has fans who seem willing to follow him to whatever country is currently signing the check.

College players leave every year, but the tribe stays. Michigan doesn't need its quarterback to explain Michigan to Michigan people. Carolina doesn't need a point guard to explain Carolina. NC State certainly doesn't need anyone to remind State fans that the rest of the world is conspiring to disrespect NC State. The school comes first, and maybe that's why I keep thinking about Indiana football.

Indiana football was bad. Not “we're rebuilding” bad or “the coach needs another recruiting class” bad. Indiana football spent generations giving its fans perfectly reasonable excuses to rake leaves on Saturdays. Indiana was a basketball school.

Then they hired the right coach and started winning, and the whole place lost its fucking mind. The stadium filled. People were singing and dancing in the streets. Indiana football suddenly had all the outward signs of a rabid football culture. Where the hell did all those people come from?

They didn't come from anywhere. They were already there. Indiana did not build a football fan base in two years. It activated one.

The football team had been terrible, but Indiana was still Indiana. The students were there. The alumni were there. The colors, songs, campus, history, and memories were there. Parents were still sending their kids to Bloomington, and kids were still going home with Indiana sweatshirts. Football sucked, but the tribe survived.

I've written before that belonging is an insurance policy against losing. Indiana made me realize I hadn't said that quite right. Belonging doesn't insure you against losing. It insures the relationship against losing.

If Indiana football were just a product, the market should have killed it years ago. Consumers had options. Every Saturday there were better football teams playing better football in better games. Change the channel. Buy another shirt. Pick a winner. That's what rational consumers do. Fans are idiots. I say that with love because I am one.

The Indiana community could stop showing up for football without stopping being Indiana. The relationship went dormant. It didn't die. Then the football got good and all that stored emotion had somewhere to go.

This is where the businesspeople should probably put down their spreadsheets for a minute. Do you know how expensive it is to acquire a customer? Do you know how hard it is to get someone who stopped caring to care again? Indiana had generations of people sitting there, emotionally attached to the institution, waiting for football to give them a reason. The asset already existed. Someone finally turned it on.

College sports can do this even to people who never went to the college. When I lived in Ohio, my nanny was a massive Ohio State fan. She didn't go to Ohio State, but it didn't matter because she was from Ohio. Ohio State was Ohio walking onto a national stage wearing shoulder pads.

Michigan does this. Alabama does it. Nebraska does it. Tennessee does it. In certain parts of the country, the line between the university, the team and the place itself becomes wonderfully blurry. You don't need a diploma to wear the shirt. You just need to believe the shirt says something about you.

This doesn't work everywhere. New York has too many teams, too many schools and too many people arguing about which part of New York is actually New York. California is practically several countries forced to share a governor. But in Ohio, Ohio State can belong to the state. The potential tribe is no longer the alumni base. It's everybody.

And then there was Ray.

Ray left Michigan and went home to Long Island. He taught school, built his life in New York, and watched decades pass. Michigan came with him, and that's the part I can't stop thinking about.

I've spent months writing about sports organizations trying to build belonging. Access. Geography. Participation. Generational connections. Heroes. Stories. Rivalries. All the little threads that eventually make a person say “we” about a group of athletes they have never met.

College sports have nearly all of them and, almost by accident, may do them better than anyone. The funny part is that sports aren't even the university's main business. Michigan didn't need football to make Ray a Michigan man. Football simply gave Ray another place to express it. That may be the greatest advantage in sports, and it makes me wonder whether professional teams can ever get there.

I'm a Giants fan. God knows they've tested it. I've lived all over the world, often nowhere near New York and sometimes in places where following an NFL team required actual effort. When I lived in China, I would get up in the middle of the night or absurdly early on Monday morning just to follow the Giants on a game tracker. Not watch the game. Follow a tiny football moving across a computer screen and wait for the page to tell me whether my week was about to be ruined.

There was no rational reason to do this. I could have slept. I could have watched highlights later. I could have adopted whatever team happened to be nearby. The Raiders. The 49ers. Now the Panthers. Pick one. There was always another team, usually a more convenient team and, God knows, often a better team. I never considered it.

The Giants came with me. Los Angeles. China. Ohio. North Carolina. Geography changed, jobs changed, and most of my life changed around them, but the Giants stayed. Maybe that's the goal. Not loyalty, which sounds like something you measure in a survey, but identity.

Ray was a Michigan man. I am a Giants fan. Sometimes, if I'm being truthful, I think the relationship goes deeper than that. New York is still part of how I see myself, and the Giants are tangled up in New York, my childhood, my family, and a thousand Sundays I can no longer separate from one another. The Giants are in there somewhere.

College sports starts with that kind of advantage. The university gives people a place, a history, a community and an identity. Sports takes all of it and puts a scoreboard on the wall.

Now college sports is becoming a very big business. NIL, transfer portals, conference realignment, television contracts and private equity sniffing around the edges have made nearly every conversation about how much more money can be pulled from the machine. Maybe a lot. But I hope someone remembers what made the machine valuable in the first place.

Michigan got a kid from Long Island to spend the rest of his life calling himself a Michigan man. The football team benefited from that relationship, but it didn't create it. That's the tribal advantage. Sports has spent billions buying audiences. The real economic advantage belongs to the organizations that build tribes.

The Gambling Trap

Anyone who has ever put a few dollars on a Sunday parlay knows the feeling. Four games have gone your way, one remains, and somehow your own team is standing between you and a payday. For a moment, you catch yourself wondering whether you really want them to win. It's an odd realization. Not because gambling is wrong, but because, for those few minutes, your relationship with your team has changed.

There was a time when sports gambling was the Rubicon of professional sports. The scandals surrounding Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose weren't simply about breaking rules. They were about protecting the integrity of competition itself. For decades, the major professional leagues treated gambling as something to be kept at arm's length. Las Vegas wasn't viewed as an expansion opportunity. It represented something sports believed it couldn't afford to embrace.

Today, that world feels almost unrecognizable. Sportsbooks are official league partners. Betting odds scroll across broadcasts as naturally as injury reports. Pregame shows discuss point spreads alongside starting lineups, and nearly every major professional league has planted its flag in Las Vegas or embraced the city in some form.

The obvious explanation is that society changed. Sports betting became legal across much of America, public attitudes softened, and what was once taboo became mainstream. I don't think that's the whole story. The more interesting change happened inside the economics of sports.

For most major professional leagues, media rights have become the engine that drives everything else. Television contracts fund expansion, increase franchise values, support player salaries, and provide owners with enormous financial certainty. Every media negotiation ultimately comes down to one question. How many people are watching? Notice what isn't being asked. How many people truly care?

That's not because caring doesn't matter. It's because caring is incredibly difficult to measure. Attention is easy. Ratings. Streaming minutes. Impressions. Engagement. Clicks. Every one of those numbers fits neatly into a spreadsheet.

Connection doesn't.

The father who has taken his daughter to Opening Day every year for a decade doesn't appear in a quarterly earnings report. The grandmother who still watches every game because it reminds her of her late husband isn't reflected in television ratings. The child who falls in love with a team and carries that loyalty into adulthood can't be measured by impressions.

Yet those are the people who built sports. Somewhere along the way, audiences and fan bases quietly became two different things.

For generations they were almost inseparable. You watched because you were already a fan. Television didn't create your loyalty. It reflected it. The bigger the fan base became, the larger the audience naturally followed. Perhaps this is also why sports once seemed so much better at creating fans.

Professional sports wasn't built as a media business. It was built as a community business. Long before billion-dollar television contracts, teams represented neighborhoods, factories, churches, ports, and cities. Baseball wasn't America's pastime because it dominated television. It became America's pastime because fathers took their children to the ballpark, kids sat on front stoops listening to games on the radio, neighbors argued about yesterday's game over coffee, and wearing your team's cap said something about where you came from.

Sports certainly wasn't perfect, but it was deeply relatable. The people in the stands often looked like the people on the field. Players lived in the community. Tickets were attainable for ordinary families. Supporting a team wasn't primarily about consuming content. It was about belonging to something larger than yourself. Modern professional sports is unquestionably bigger, wealthier, and more sophisticated. The athletes are global celebrities. Teams have become international brands. Broadcasts reach every corner of the world. None of that is inherently bad. In many ways, it's a remarkable success story.

But success can also create distance.

The more sports becomes a global media product, the less it naturally belongs to any one community. Connection no longer happens automatically. It has to be intentionally created. If leagues can generate enormous audiences through media, gambling, fantasy sports, and endless digital content, the incentive to do the slower, harder work of cultivating lifelong fans inevitably begins to change.

That's the question I keep coming back to. Have we become so good at attracting attention that we've forgotten how to create belonging? Because attention can fill a television audience for an afternoon. Belonging can fill a stadium for generations. Today the relationship can work in reverse.

Sports has become remarkably good at creating audiences without necessarily creating fans. Gambling is one way to do it. Fantasy sports is another. Social media, prediction contests, viral highlights, and endless debate shows all accomplish the same objective. They give people a reason to watch games they otherwise wouldn't care about. None of that is inherently bad.

I've placed bets. I've played fantasy football. Millions of us have. These products make games more interesting. A Wednesday night game between two teams I've never followed suddenly becomes worth watching because I have something riding on the outcome.

That's good business. There's no denying it. A Wednesday night game between two teams I couldn't have named a week earlier suddenly becomes compelling because I have twenty dollars riding on the outcome. The television is on. The ratings improve. The broadcaster is happy. The league is happy. Everyone involved has accomplished exactly what they set out to do.

The question is whether that's fan development or simply audience development. I don't think those are the same thing.

A fan watches because they care. A gambler cares because they're watching. The distinction sounds subtle, but I think it's profound. One relationship is built on identity, the other on incentive. One survives losing seasons and coaching changes. The other often ends the moment the final whistle blows.

That's why I keep coming back to the same question. Does gambling actually create fans?

We already know what it does exceptionally well. It creates viewers. It increases engagement. It drives media value and generates billions of dollars in economic activity. Those aren't theories anymore. They're established facts.

What isn't nearly as clear is whether it creates someone who still cares ten years later, after they've stopped betting. Does it create the parent who introduces their children to the team? Does it create traditions, memories, and a sense of belonging? Or does it simply create another reason to watch today's game? I honestly don't know.

That uncertainty leads to an even more uncomfortable question. For the upper echelon of professional sports, does creating true fans even matter anymore?

Fifty years ago, that question would have sounded ridiculous. Today, I'm not convinced it is.

It's not that fans have stopped paying the bills. They haven't. They still do. They just pay differently. Instead of buying a ticket and a hot dog, they're paying for cable packages, multiple streaming subscriptions, mobile data plans, merchandise, and increasingly expensive game tickets. The money still originates with supporters. It's simply collected farther upstream.

That's why the economics begin to shift. When billions of dollars arrive through media contracts before a ticket is ever sold, the next dollar doesn't necessarily come from convincing another family to spend an afternoon at the ballpark. It comes from negotiating the next television deal, attracting another viewer, or keeping people watching a little longer.

You can see the consequences everywhere. Conversations around the cost of attending a Knicks playoff game, a Super Bowl, or a World Cup match have become almost as common as conversations about the games themselves. For many supporters, being physically present has become a luxury. Their connection to the team increasingly comes through a screen.

None of this means fans matter less. In fact, they remain the foundation of the entire economic model. Without them paying for subscriptions, buying merchandise, watching broadcasts, and creating the demand that advertisers want to reach, the system collapses. The question is subtler than that.

Has the distance between the fan and the league become so great that the business increasingly optimizes for audiences instead of cultivating supporters?

Organizations become remarkably good at producing whatever they're rewarded for producing. If the market rewards attention, they'll optimize for attention. If gambling reliably creates attention, then gambling becomes an incredibly valuable business tool. That's not a moral judgment. It's Economics 101.

In many ways, that's the real transformation. Sports once monetized fans. Increasingly, it monetizes attention. Those aren't the same business, even though we've started talking about them as if they were.

What's particularly interesting is that parts of Europe, where sports betting has been woven into the fabric of professional sports for decades, are beginning to ask whether they've gone too far. Regulators are debating tighter restrictions on gambling advertising and sponsorships. Markets usually move toward successful products, not away from them, so it's worth asking what they've learned that we're only beginning to discover.

Perhaps they've discovered that attention and connection are different currencies. Attention can be purchased. Connection has to be earned. An audience can always be rented. A fan never can.

That's ultimately why I think this conversation matters. Not because gambling will destroy sports. I don't believe it will. But because if sports begins confusing audience growth with fan development, it risks neglecting the very thing that made it valuable in the first place.

Today's audience helps you negotiate the next television contract. Today's fan creates tomorrow's audience. That's a distinction worth remembering, because if we ever stop creating fans, eventually we'll run out of audiences to rent.

The First Barrier Isn’t Physical

I've spent most of my life around sports. As a kid, I found my lane in sports for a simple reason: I never really saw myself the way other people saw me. I was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, use a wheelchair, and stand 4'5". Other people often saw limitations. I saw competition. I saw teammates. I saw the chance to be part of something bigger than myself. Looking back, that may have been one of the greatest gifts sports gave me. It taught me that belonging often starts with belief.

Over the years, sports has taken me places I never imagined. I've worked with professional teams, international events, governing bodies, sponsors, and athletes around the world. Through all of it, I've learned something that has very little to do with wins and losses. People do not participate in things they do not believe are for them.

The obvious barriers are easy to identify. Equipment. Facilities. Transportation. Funding. Those challenges are real, but I've come to believe they are often symptoms rather than root causes. We frequently talk about sports participation as if it suffers from dozens of separate problems. Not enough facilities. Not enough funding. Not enough coaches. Not enough volunteers. Not enough awareness.

In reality, many of these challenges stem from the same issue: participation. There are more potential athletes out there than most people realize. The challenge is not a lack of people. The challenge is that too many people never find their way into the ecosystem. When participation numbers are small, everything becomes harder. It becomes harder to secure facilities, attract sponsors, build leagues, develop coaches and volunteers, create meaningful competition, and sustain organizations over the long term.

The challenge is not simply helping one athlete find one sport. The challenge is building enough participation to create a thriving community. And that is where belief comes in.

Many people simply do not believe they belong. Many parents of children with disabilities have spent years hearing about limitations rather than possibilities. Doctors, educators, therapists, and society generally mean well, but the conversation often centers on what a child cannot do instead of what they can. Over time, expectations become constrained.

As a result, families sometimes underestimate what sport can mean for their children. Not because they lack ambition. Not because they don't care. But because they have never been shown what is possible. What begins as recreation can become friendship, confidence, independence, travel, leadership opportunities, collegiate competition, national team participation, and for a select few, even the Paralympic Games. The same challenge exists for adults.

Many adults with disabilities have never been introduced to adaptive sports. Some acquired a disability later in life. Others simply grew up without access to opportunities. After years of navigating inaccessible environments and lowered expectations, many stop seeing themselves as athletes. Not because they can't participate, but because it never occurred to them that they belong there. That realization has changed the way I think about sports, inclusion, and community building.

We are not simply trying to recruit athletes. We are helping people reimagine what is possible. That is where storytelling becomes essential.

A parent sees a wheelchair basketball player heading to college. A veteran sees another veteran return to competition after a life changing injury. A child sees someone who looks like them wearing a team jersey. An adult discovers someone their age learning a new sport. In an instant, possibility becomes visible. The conversation changes. This is why I don't view storytelling as a marketing tactic. I view it as infrastructure.

Throughout history, sport has often served as society's proving ground for inclusion. It provided one of the first highly visible platforms where people of different races competed together and where women demonstrated their athletic ability on a national stage. Sport didn't solve these issues, but it helped make inclusion visible. Sport has a unique ability to turn unfamiliarity into familiarity. Teammates become friends. Competitors become respected rivals. Fans rally around people they may never have understood otherwise. Disability may be the next chapter in that story.

One of the biggest mistakes we make is treating disability as a niche issue. It isn't. Disability touches nearly every family eventually. Sometimes through birth. Sometimes through injury. Sometimes through illness. Sometimes through aging. The person with no connection to disability today may have one tomorrow.

That is why the conversation cannot stay within the disability community. If adaptive sports is going to reach its full potential, it must become part of the broader sports conversation. Because at its best, sport has never really been about winning.

It is about belonging. And in my experience, the first barrier to belonging is rarely physical. It is helping people believe they belong in the first place.

The Connection Problem

Every sport has a chicken and egg problem. Do facilities create participation, or does participation create facilities? The answer, of course, is both. I've seen communities invest in quality facilities and watch participation grow almost overnight. I've also seen grassroots programs outgrow their space and force communities to invest in better infrastructure. The relationship works in both directions.

But the more time I spend around adaptive sports, the more I think we're often describing different symptoms of the same underlying challenge. Spend enough time around adaptive sports and you'll hear a familiar list of concerns. We need more facilities. More funding. More coaches. More volunteers. More athletes. None of those concerns are wrong. The question I've been wrestling with is whether they all stem from the same place. As someone who spent most of his career in sports marketing, I've always been fascinated by what causes people to show up. What turns someone from a casual observer into a participant or a fan? What makes a family invest their time and money? What creates momentum around a sport?

Earlier in my career, I spent years helping leagues, teams, and athletes build audiences in markets where fans had limited access to the product. The challenge wasn't that interest didn't exist. It was that the connection didn't exist. The goal was to create enough awareness, engagement, and demand that access would eventually become easier. The more time I spend around adaptive sports, the more familiar that feels.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think adaptive sports primarily suffers from a shortage of athletes. I think it suffers from a shortage of connection. The athletes are out there. They're sitting in classrooms. They're leaving rehabilitation programs. They're veterans looking for community. They're adults who have never been introduced to adaptive sports. They're parents trying to figure out what's possible for their child. At the same time, opportunities are out there too. Across the country there are adaptive sports programs looking for athletes, volunteers, coaches, officials, sponsors, and supporters.

Yet somehow they keep missing each other. That's what makes this problem so frustrating. Athletes struggle to find opportunities. Opportunities struggle to find athletes. Volunteers struggle to find programs. Programs struggle to find volunteers.

It sounds like a connection problem. And once you start looking at adaptive sports through that lens, many of the solutions begin to look different. Storytelling becomes important because stories help people see what's possible. Schools become important because they expose young people to opportunities they might never discover otherwise. Social media becomes important because it helps programs remain visible and accessible. Platforms become important because they help people find information that is otherwise scattered across dozens of organizations. And facilities become important because they create a physical place where people can find one another.

In many ways, a great facility is one of the most powerful tools for solving the connection problem. A permanent home creates visibility. It creates consistency. It gives athletes, families, volunteers, and community members a place to gather. It reduces the friction that prevents people from getting involved in the first place. That's why facilities matter so much. Not simply because they provide courts, fields, storage space, or meeting rooms, but because they strengthen the connections that every successful sports community depends upon. A facility becomes more than a building. It becomes a gathering place. It becomes a symbol that the community exists. And it becomes a doorway through which new athletes, volunteers, families, and supporters can enter the ecosystem.

Fort Wayne is a good example. Dedicated adaptive sports space didn't just provide gym time. It created visibility, consistency, credibility, and community. Participation followed. The same principle applies on a smaller scale.

Nobody looked at an empty field and said, "You know what this town needs? More soccer." More often, somebody found a field, put up a couple of goals, and gave kids a consistent place to play. Kids started showing up. Parents got involved. Coaches volunteered. Leagues formed. Eventually communities invested in better facilities and more places to play. The strongest sports ecosystems are built through a feedback loop. Connection creates participation. Participation attracts investment. Investment improves the experience. Improved experiences attract more participants.

At some point the cycle begins reinforcing itself. The challenge for adaptive sports is that many organizations spend years operating in borrowed space. They move from gym to gym, rebuild schedules around someone else's priorities, and struggle to maintain visibility in the community. Consistency creates community. Community creates participation. Participation attracts investment. Without that consistency, maintaining momentum becomes much harder. That's one reason I believe adaptive sports ultimately needs more dedicated facilities, not fewer. Not because buildings solve the problem by themselves, but because communities eventually outgrow borrowed space.

If connection is the challenge, then we also need to think carefully about who belongs in the ecosystem. No sport survives on athletes alone. Every successful sports ecosystem depends on parents, coaches, volunteers, sponsors, officials, fans, and future participants. Adaptive sports is no different. When classmates without disabilities play wheelchair basketball, when siblings participate in boccia clinics, or when community members try adaptive sports for the first time, something important happens. The ecosystem becomes larger, more visible, and more sustainable. Some of those participants become volunteers. Some become advocates. Some become coaches. Some become lifelong fans. Most importantly, they help normalize adaptive sports and expand the network of people connected to it.

If our goal is to increase participation, grow awareness, and build stronger sports communities, we should be looking for ways to bring more people into the ecosystem, not fewer.

Maybe that's why I keep coming back to connection. The athletes are already out there. The families are already out there. The volunteers are already out there. The coaches are already out there. The opportunities are already out there.

The challenge is helping them find one another. That's why storytelling matters. That's why schools matter. That's why social media matters. That's why platforms matter. And that's why facilities matter.

Each plays a different role, but they all serve the same purpose: creating connections between people who might otherwise never find one another. Do that, and participation grows. Do that, and communities grow. Do that, and eventually the case for more facilities, more investment, and more opportunities becomes obvious.

Because people don't build communities around buildings. They build buildings around communities.

The Product We Forgot

I was sitting in a conference room in Boston at the Aspen Institute's Project Play Summit when something happened that caught me completely off guard. One of the speakers represented a private equity firm that had recently begun investing in youth sports. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but before he had much of a chance to explain why he was there, the room turned on him. It wasn't subtle. It wasn't even particularly polite. The anger felt almost immediate, as if he had walked into the room carrying everything these people feared youth sports were becoming. They weren't reacting to him. They were reacting to what he represented.

What struck me wasn't the reaction itself. It was who was reacting. The room wasn't filled with anti-business activists or people hostile to capitalism. It was filled with coaches, recreation professionals, nonprofit leaders and administrators who had devoted their careers to getting kids to play sports. These were people who spent every day trying to convince one more child to join a team, one more family to participate and one more community to invest in recreation. Almost instinctively, they rejected what this man represented.

At first, I assumed they simply hated private equity. The more I thought about it, the less convincing that explanation became. Most of the people in that room understood money. They understood budgets, fundraising, sponsorships and the constant miserable struggle to keep programs alive. Many of them probably spent half their lives begging people with money to give them some. Investment itself wasn't the enemy. Something else was bothering them.

The same conference produced another moment I couldn't shake. The founder of an AI company talked about the software company he founded, the software analyzed athletic performance, tracked development and generated personalized training plans. It was pretty cool technology, but his customers were the parents of eight, nine, ten and eleven year old kids.

Another panelist finally said what at least some of us were thinking. Maybe we should be careful introducing this kind of technology to children this young. These weren't professional athletes or even college athletes. They were kids, some of them eight years old, and I left Boston thinking we had somehow skipped childhood altogether. Before a kid had even fallen in love with the game, we were already trying to optimize him for it.

For the last several months, I've been writing about sports and belonging. I've written about why some athletes become inseparable from a city while others, despite greater accomplishments, remain admired from a distance. I've written about gambling and what happens when fans begin to question the integrity of competition. I've written about relatability and why we form emotional attachments to certain teams while remaining completely indifferent to others. For a while, I thought I was writing about different things, but I wasn't. I kept circling the same question: what happens when the economics of sports begin pulling in a different direction than the humanity of sports?

Once you see that tension, you can't stop seeing it. Youth sports have become an industry. Parents spend enormous amounts of money chasing elite travel teams, private instruction, showcase tournaments and recruiting opportunities. College athletics has become a labor market where athletes, understandably, pursue the best financial opportunities available. Professional athletes have become global brands with production companies, investment portfolios, podcasts, endorsement deals and media companies. Everybody is maximizing something.

I remember talking with our nanny in Ohio as she wrestled with this problem. Her son is an exceptional baseball player already playing on two travel teams. Then came an invitation to compete with USA Baseball at the youth level. That's the call every sports parent thinks they want until the bill arrives. It was an incredible honor and another significant financial commitment, so what do you do? Your kid has worked his ass off. Very few children get this opportunity. Saying no means lying awake wondering whether you just closed the door on your kid's dream. Saying yes means lying awake wondering how the hell you're going to pay for it.

Of course you find the money, and the system knows it. I don't mean that some evil bastard is sitting in a dark room intentionally exploiting parents. The coaches believe in the opportunity. The organization believes in its program. The parents want to support their son. Everybody involved may have the best intentions in the world, yet the system keeps asking for another commitment, another tournament, another flight, another hotel room and another check.

The machine doesn't need a villain. It only needs incentives. Parents are trying to create opportunities for their children. Investors pursue growing markets. Universities compete for talent. Professional careers are brutally short, so athletes maximize their earning potential. None of this is particularly irrational, and that's what makes the problem so difficult. Almost everyone is doing exactly what the system encourages them to do.

This is also where I need to be clear about something. I am not anti-business. I have spent most of my career in and around the business of sports. I believe athletes should make money, investors should earn returns and organizations should build sustainable businesses. Sports do not become more virtuous because everyone involved is broke.

My concern is almost the opposite. Good businesses understand the difference between creating value and extracting it. They build products, develop customers, invest in infrastructure and strengthen relationships because they believe those things will create future economic value. Increasingly, I wonder whether parts of the American sports system are trying to reverse that order.

We may be monetizing the customer before we have finished creating the customer.

When a child first picks up a basketball, he isn't thinking about NIL deals, television contracts, salary caps or private equity. He wants to make the team, wear the jersey and sit with his friends on the bus. Maybe, for the first time in his life, he wants to feel like he belongs somewhere. That feeling is not some sentimental byproduct of sports. I am beginning to think it may be one of the most valuable things sports creates.

Maybe the strangest thing about the American youth sports machine is that much of the rest of the world doesn't operate this way. Many European sports systems are built around local clubs, volunteers and public or institutional support. Parents may still pay fees, but the development system is not always constructed around asking families to write a bigger check every time their child gets better.

Then there is Norway, a country that has something called Children's Rights in Sport. That sounds like the kind of thing Americans would mock at a school board meeting until you look at what Norway has produced. Its system emphasizes safety, friendship, mastery and a child's right to choose what sports they play and how much they participate.

To its credit, the Aspen Institute's Project Play has been pushing many of the same ideas in the United States. Its Children's Bill of Rights in Sports begins with a remarkably simple principle: every child has the right to play sports. More than 500 athletes, organizations and government entities have endorsed the framework.

There is, however, an important structural difference between the American and Norwegian approaches. Project Play is trying to change a massive, fragmented youth sports culture through leadership, research and collective action. Norway embedded children's rights within the governance structure of organized sport, alongside provisions governing how children's sports are actually conducted.

One is working to move an enormous and decentralized system toward a different set of values. The other has those values built into the structure of the system itself.

That distinction is not a criticism of Project Play. If anything, it illustrates the size of the problem they are trying to solve. American youth sports has become a massive commercial market with thousands of independent organizations and increasingly sophisticated investors. Project Play has correctly identified the need to put children back at the center of sports. The harder question is how you make that principle powerful enough to push against an economic system moving rapidly in the other direction.

While we are trying to identify, train and optimize the next great athlete before he hits puberty, Norway seems to be doing something almost radical. They let kids play, and somehow, against all of our sophisticated economic instincts, they keep producing extraordinary athletes.

But maybe the real lesson from Norway isn't how many great athletes the country produces. Maybe it's how many children they invite into the system in the first place. Participation is one of the first doors into belonging. A child joins a team, wears the jersey, finds friends and begins to understand the rituals of a sport. Somewhere along the way, the child who plays may become the fan who watches.

That relationship matters economically. A participant may become a fan. The fan may become a ticket buyer, television viewer and jersey buyer. Eventually, that fan may become a parent who introduces another child to the game. Sports have somehow created relationships with consumers that can last generations, and then we act as though the process that creates those relationships sits outside the business.

Perhaps the biggest mistake professional sports has made is treating youth participation and community impact primarily as philanthropy. Leagues and teams fund clinics, donate equipment, build courts and run community programs, often through foundations and charitable initiatives. All of that is good, but I wonder if we have put it in the wrong column.

Participation is not the product, but it is one way into the product. So is access. So is community connection. So is integrity. So is storytelling. So is the relationship between a player and the people who wear his jersey. These are all ways sports create, strengthen and protect belonging.

Belonging is the asset.

Once I started thinking about it that way, the economics began to look different. Brand equity is an intangible asset. Customer loyalty has economic value. Goodwill has economic value. Businesses invest billions trying to create emotional relationships with consumers because those relationships influence purchasing behavior, retention and lifetime value. Yet sports, which may have created the strongest consumer relationships in the world, often seem to treat the very things that build those relationships as charitable work.

The distinction between philanthropy and investment matters. Philanthropy is money you give away because you believe something is worth supporting. Investment is money you deploy because you believe it will create or protect future value. The same dollar can produce social good and economic value, but how an organization classifies that dollar changes how seriously it treats the work.

If community impact is philanthropy, it becomes a cost center. It gets a foundation, an annual report and a photograph of a player handing a giant check to a group of smiling children. When budgets tighten, it becomes vulnerable. When leadership changes, priorities move. The people running the work often sit far away from the rooms where ticketing, sponsorship, marketing and business strategy are discussed.

But if belonging is an economic asset, community impact starts to look very different. The child meeting a player may be forming a relationship with the team. The family attending a free clinic may begin to think of the local franchise as our team. A basketball court, baseball field or soccer program may be infrastructure for future fan development. The work can still be good for the community. It can still be charitable. It may also be a long-term investment in the business.

Maybe sports have spent too long putting belonging in the wrong column.

This is not a binary choice between making money and protecting the soul of sports. Good businesses make choices about where to invest capital every day. They invest in technology, stadiums, premium hospitality, media production, data and customer acquisition because they believe those investments will produce future returns. Nobody asks a team to stop making money in order to care about belonging.

The question is whether belonging deserves to be part of the same capital allocation conversation.

Right now, the sports business is doing extraordinarily well. Franchise values continue to rise. Media rights are enormous. Owners are making bags of money and players are creating generational wealth. If I walked into an owner's office and told him his business model was failing because the average fan felt increasingly disconnected, he could point to the value of his franchise and quite reasonably tell me to get the fuck out of his office.

I cannot prove the current model is unsustainable. Maybe premium experiences, global audiences, gambling, streaming and wealthy consumers will continue driving the sports economy upward for decades. Maybe sports have figured this out and I'm worrying about a problem that will never arrive.

But businesses insure valuable assets against risks they cannot predict.

The sports economy is increasingly dependent on audience, and an audience is not necessarily a fan base. Gambling can give someone a reason to watch two teams they do not care about. Fantasy sports can do the same. A superstar, a viral moment or a new media platform can create enormous attention. Those are powerful audience engines, but attention and belonging are not the same thing.

The audience may leave when the reason to watch disappears. The fan stays.

That is why I keep coming back to belonging. The old sports economy was built on an enormous foundation of ordinary fans. They played the games, watched the games, bought tickets when they could afford them and passed their irrational attachments to their children. Individually, many of them were not particularly valuable customers. Collectively, they made sports culturally unavoidable.

The modern sports business may be getting extraordinarily good at monetizing the belonging those generations created. Premium seats generate more revenue. Corporate hospitality generates more revenue. Wealthy customers can spend more in one night than an ordinary family might spend in a season. Every individual decision makes economic sense.

I simply wonder whether the industry is investing as aggressively in creating the next generation of belonging as it is in monetizing the belonging that already exists.

That is not a prediction of collapse. It is a question of risk management. You don't buy insurance because you know your house will burn down. You buy insurance because the house is valuable and fire is possible.

If belonging is the intangible asset underneath the sports economy, then participation, access, community connection, authenticity and integrity are not soft, sentimental shit sitting outside the business. They are ways of investing in and protecting the asset.

Looking back, I don't think the room in Boston was rejecting private equity. I think they were reacting to something they could feel but perhaps couldn't quite articulate. Private equity represented another sophisticated machine designed to find value and generate a return. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Maybe the fear was that we were bringing the machinery of value extraction into the relationship before we had finished creating the value.

Markets are remarkably good at measuring what something is worth today. They are less capable of measuring the value of a child falling in love with a sport, a family deciding a team belongs to them or a fan passing that relationship to a child twenty years later. Those things are harder to put on a spreadsheet.

Harder to measure does not mean economically worthless.

The sports industry may have spent decades becoming extraordinarily sophisticated at monetizing belonging while remaining surprisingly careless about investing in it. Maybe the product was never the game, the stadium or the media rights.

Maybe the product was the relationship all along.

The 5 Connections Behind Every Great Fan Base

Most people do not become emotionally invested in a carbon fiber boat.

That may seem like an odd way to begin an article about sports fandom, but it is a lesson that has stayed with me throughout my career. Years ago, while working with China's America's Cup sailing team, I found myself wrestling with a question that sports executives everywhere seem to ask: How do we build a fan base?

The answer is usually assumed to be marketing. More advertising. More content. Better social media. A new brand campaign. A bigger media budget. A better game day experience. Those things matter, but I have never been convinced they are the primary drivers of fandom.

The America's Cup is one of the oldest and most prestigious sporting events in the world. The boats are technological marvels. The budgets are enormous. The competition is extraordinary. Yet outside sailing circles, very few people can name a single sailor.

That is not because the athletes are uninteresting. Quite the opposite. The people on those boats have remarkable stories. They have spent years mastering a highly specialized craft, competing around the world, and sacrificing enormous amounts to reach the highest level of their sport. The problem is that most people never hear those stories.

Instead, the conversation often centers on billionaire owners, sponsorship deals, technology, and luxury. Those things may interest existing sailing fans, but they do very little to create new ones. People become emotionally invested in people.

That observation led me to a broader conclusion that has followed me throughout my career. Sports organizations often treat fan development as a marketing challenge when it is more accurately a connection challenge. Marketing creates awareness. Connection creates loyalty.

When I look across sports, I believe the strongest fan bases are built through five forms of connection: access, participation, geography, generational loyalty, and people. More importantly, the most successful organizations rarely rely on just one.

Access

The easiest way to create a sports fan is to allow someone to experience the product.

Most sports fans can remember their first visit to a stadium or arena. The field looks larger than it does on television. The atmosphere feels different. The anticipation is tangible. Those experiences create memories that often last a lifetime. Sports organizations frequently underestimate the importance of that first exposure. They spend enormous resources trying to convince people to care about a team before those people have ever experienced it. Yet fandom is usually born from exposure, not persuasion.

This is one of the reasons established leagues enjoy such a significant advantage. Their games are visible. Their venues are accessible. Their brands are embedded in everyday life. Emerging sports often face the opposite challenge. Events may be difficult to attend. Broadcast coverage may be limited. Venues may be temporary or inconsistent. In some cases, potential fans may not even know the sport exists.

It is difficult to become passionate about something you rarely see.

Participation

Participation remains one of the most underappreciated drivers of fan development. People support what they play.

Lacrosse provides perhaps the best modern example. Over the last several decades, the sport has grown dramatically across the United States, not because of massive television deals or billion dollar marketing campaigns, but because more young people gained access to playing it. Youth leagues expanded. Club programs multiplied. High schools added teams. Colleges invested in the sport. Participation created familiarity, and familiarity created fans.

The growth of lacrosse also highlights another important lesson. The sport's stakeholders were largely rowing in the same direction. From youth leagues to colleges, governing bodies, club programs, and professional organizations, most participants in the ecosystem shared a common objective: get more people playing the sport.

Many sports spend enormous amounts of energy competing with themselves. Organizations fight over athletes, facilities, sponsorships, events, and recognition. Growth becomes secondary to protecting turf. Lacrosse largely avoided that trap. The ecosystem recognized that participation was the rising tide that would lift everyone.

Golf offers a different version of the same lesson. For decades, the sport carried a reputation for being expensive, exclusive, and inaccessible. Programs like First Tee recognized that if more people were going to care about golf, more people first needed the opportunity to play it.

Rather than focusing exclusively on developing spectators, First Tee focused on developing golfers. Some participants became competitive golfers. Many did not. But almost all left with a greater appreciation for the sport. That is often enough.

Not every participant becomes an elite athlete, but many become lifelong supporters, volunteers, coaches, parents, advocates, and fans. Organizations frequently focus on spectator development while overlooking participation. In reality, participation may be the most effective fan development strategy available.

Geography

Sometimes fandom has very little to do with the sport itself.

People support teams because those teams represent where they are from. A club becomes a symbol of a city. A university becomes a source of regional pride. A national team becomes a reflection of identity.

As a New Yorker, I can tell you that sports fan or not, many New Yorkers will passionately root against anything Boston related. The rivalry often transcends the sport itself. It is not really about baseball, football, or hockey. It is about identity.

Honestly, it could be about pizza, lobster rolls, or whose accent is more annoying. The teams simply become stand ins for something larger. Supporting one side or the other becomes a way of expressing who you are, where you are from, and which tribe you belong to.

The same dynamic exists throughout the world. People often support teams not because they have studied the roster or understand the tactics, but because supporting that team feels like supporting their community. When people believe a team represents them, support often survives losing seasons, poor management, and disappointing results. The connection becomes deeper than the product itself.

Generational Loyalty

Many sports loyalties are inherited. A parent supports a team, so their children do the same. An older sibling wears a jersey, and before long the younger sibling wants one too. Long before children understand statistics, standings, or championships, they understand belonging.

I can already see this happening with my own daughters. They are eight years old, and whether they like it or not, Knicks and Giants gear somehow keeps finding its way into their closets. They may eventually choose their own teams, but their introduction to sports fandom is happening through the people around them.

This is one of the greatest advantages enjoyed by established sports properties. Decades of history create generational loyalty that is nearly impossible to replicate overnight. No marketing campaign can manufacture the experience of sitting on a couch with your parents watching the same team every weekend for twenty years. Those experiences become traditions. Traditions become culture.

For newer leagues and emerging sports, that presents a challenge. History cannot be manufactured and generational loyalty cannot be accelerated. It can only be earned over time.

People

The final pathway may be the most important of all. People follow people before they follow teams.

Sports organizations often believe fans connect with brands, logos, facilities, or championships. While those things matter, they are rarely where fandom begins. Fandom begins with human beings.

A child meets an athlete and becomes a fan for life. A family develops a relationship with a coach and begins following an entire program. A community rallies around a local player who represents something larger than themselves. The relationship comes first. The team comes second.

This is why I have always believed sailing missed an opportunity with the America's Cup. The athletes were there. The stories were there. The personalities were there. Yet too often the sport focused on the technology, the money, and the spectacle rather than the people behind the competition.

The same mistake occurs throughout sports. Organizations spend enormous resources promoting schedules, results, and announcements while failing to introduce fans to the individuals who make the sport meaningful.

Michael Jordan helped grow the NBA because people connected with Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods brought millions of new people to golf because people connected with Tiger Woods. Caitlin Clark has expanded the audience for women's basketball because people connect with Caitlin Clark. The athlete becomes the entry point. The team or league becomes the destination.

Of course, not every organization has equal access to this form of connection. AAA baseball clubs provide a good example. While major league teams often build fandom around star players, minor league affiliates frequently struggle because their most marketable assets are not entirely under their control. A player can be promoted, demoted, traded, or reassigned with little notice. Fans may buy a jersey one month only to discover their favorite player is gone the next.

As a result, many successful minor league organizations have learned to build connections in different ways. They invest heavily in the ballpark experience, local identity, community engagement, family entertainment, and traditions that are not dependent on any one player.

The lesson is not that people matter less. It is that organizations must understand which forms of connection they can control and strengthen accordingly. The strongest brands rarely rely on a single pathway. They build several at the same time.

There is, however, a trap that sports organizations frequently fall into. Once they see the impact a transformational athlete can have, they begin trying to manufacture the next one.

I saw this firsthand while working in China. Yao Ming's impact on the NBA was extraordinary. He gave hundreds of millions of Chinese fans a personal connection to the league. He was not simply a great player. He was a cultural bridge between two worlds.

The league benefited enormously from that connection, but Yao was also a unicorn. His combination of talent, timing, personality, and national significance was incredibly rare. After Yao's success, countless sports properties entered China hoping to replicate the same formula. Find a Chinese athlete, place them in a league, and a massive audience would follow.

It rarely worked.

The mistake was assuming that Yao created fans because he was Chinese. In reality, fans followed Yao because he was compelling, authentic, successful, and relatable. His nationality mattered, but it was only part of the story.

Connection can be created intentionally, but it cannot be manufactured mechanically. In some cases, forcing that strategy can actually damage a brand. Fans quickly recognize when a connection feels artificial.

The lesson was never "find another Yao Ming." The lesson was "give people someone they can genuinely care about."

Putting It All Together

These five forms of connection do not operate independently. The strongest sports brands build all of them simultaneously.

Ironically, one of the best examples may be the New York Yankees, and I am not even a Yankees fan.

The Yankees have access. Even non-baseball fans often describe their first visit to Yankee Stadium as memorable. They have participation. Baseball has been played by generations of Americans. They have geography. Supporting or opposing the Yankees is often as much about identity as it is about baseball. They have generational loyalty. Families pass Yankees fandom from one generation to the next.

And they have people.

Even non-baseball fans know the stories. Babe Ruth. Lou Gehrig. Joe DiMaggio. Derek Jeter. Most Americans have heard of at least one of them. Many know their stories. Lou Gehrig's farewell speech remains one of the most recognizable moments in sports history.

The organization has also understood that maintaining those connections requires effort. Programs like HOPE Week place players directly into communities, creating opportunities for fans to connect with the people behind the uniforms.

Those initiatives are acts of service, but they are also brand building. The athletes strengthen their own brands while strengthening the Yankees brand at the same time. The two objectives are not in conflict. At their best, they reinforce one another.

The Yankees are not successful because they mastered one of these elements. They are successful because they spent more than a century strengthening all five.

That may be the real lesson for newer teams, leagues, and organizations. They cannot manufacture history. They cannot create legendary athletes on demand. But they can intentionally build pathways for connection. They can improve access. They can encourage participation. They can embrace their communities. They can create traditions. They can elevate the people behind the sport.

No single element is enough on its own. A great athlete cannot compensate for a lack of community connection. A beautiful facility cannot replace participation. Geography alone rarely creates lasting fandom. The strongest organizations keep all five elements in play and allow them to reinforce one another over time.

That is how connection grows. And ultimately, that is how fan bases are built.