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Sports fans of teams from other cities (that they aren't from)

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It's funny, all my buddies from Vancouver (when I lived there) constantly mocked and derided me for being a Leafs fan (for obvious reasons) but this year they were totally supportive and started cheering for Toronto after the "Nucks got swept.
Then your Vancouver buddies are horrible people.
 
I think it's a mix of irrationality, growing up in a time when a certain team is successful and liking certain players. Friends and family can be factors as well.
 
Yes I'm from Toronto, and yes, I'm clearly a little sucky after last night. It bothers me because sharing the vibe of your home team with people FROM your home is such a good feeling, and that the people I made the thread about just seem to get off on being "different" and I don't really get it.

Not sure why it bothers you. Sometimes people watch a team play and connect with them over their home team.

My uncle is from Nova Scotia and has been living in Calgary for the past 15 or so years. He's a die-hard Av's fan through and through. He always gets comments from people with your mentality saying shit like "You have some nerve wearing that jersey in this city." Give me a break. Celebrate the fact that hockey has a diverse fan base and stop being salty that there was someone there to cheer on the team that beat yours. Especially when they pissed away a 3 goal lead.
 
It's funny, all my buddies from Vancouver (when I lived there) constantly mocked and derided me for being a Leafs fan (for obvious reasons) but this year they were totally supportive and started cheering for Toronto after the "Nucks got swept.
You'll all cheer for Ottawa now. Damn fairweather Canadian fans.

I'm guessing they hate the Bruins more than the Leafs.
Yeah, that's the actual reason for all of that Leaf support. Those wounds from 2011 haven't fully healed yet.
 
It's funny, all my buddies from Vancouver (when I lived there) constantly mocked and derided me for being a Leafs fan (for obvious reasons) but this year they were totally supportive and started cheering for Toronto after the "Nucks got swept.

I'm guessing they hate the Bruins more than the Leafs.
 
I have a friend who grew up in Louisiana who roots for the Green Bay Packers because they're the only community-owned team. Truly a sports team for the people.

I'm my honest unbiased opinion, who wouldn't want to root for a team with the history and uniqueness that is the 13 time WORLD CHAMPION Green Bay Packers?
 
I grew up a San Francisco Giants, 49ers & Warriors fan - thanks to my dad and the rest of my family, though we live in the East Bay (and I work in San Francisco). I've followed the Oakland A's since I was in elementary school because we would often take trips to the Coliseum for school field trips as a reward for doing good in school. Strangely, I was never a Raiders fan.

Once I got older, I got into following the San Jose Sharks as well as the Florida Panthers as my friends in junior high got me into hockey. With Basketball, I usually followed players rather than teams, save for the Warriors.

So really, I've always been a fan of Bay Area teams, except for the Raiders (because meh, I think they suck).
 
Then your Vancouver buddies are horrible people.

I dunno, in a lot of cases rooting for a different team from your state or country or conference after yours is out of the playoffs seems okay. You just don't get to be as happy as the true fans if that team takes it.
 
Not sure why it bothers you. Sometimes people watch a team play and connect with them over their home team.

My uncle is from Nova Scotia and has been living in Calgary for the past 15 or so years. He's a die-hard Av's fan through and through. He always gets comments from people with your mentality saying shit like "You have some nerve wearing that jersey in this city." Give me a break. Celebrate the fact that hockey has a diverse fan base and stop being salty that there was someone there to cheer on the team that beat yours. Especially when they pissed away a 3 goal lead.

I'm not hating on the Bruins at all, the Leafs dun fucked up huge I'm not denying that, nor am I denying anyone the right to cheer on whatever team they like. It's the reasons and mentality behind most of them that are confusing to me and why I made the thread.

I'm guessing they hate the Bruins more than the Leafs.

Well duh.

You'll all cheer for Ottawa now. Damn fairweather Canadian fans.

Never in a million godamn years.
 
I like other teams besides my hometown team if they play good. I give credit were credit is due but I would never say I'm a true fan though. I love my NY teams.

NOT ACCEPTABLE

- Abandoning a team because they're not successful and choosing another that is more successful

That would be 'traitorous'. What's the point of even cheering for a team if you can just abandon it when things aren't going well and choose a team that has it going good. The entire system breaks down when you universalize this, so therefore it's bad.

This infuriates me, I cant take sports seriously with anybody that abandons teams or jump on band wagons when a team gets hot. I was extremely disgusted in my cousin when he dropped the cavaliers like a bad date when Lebron left, he also flip flops all over the place with the NFL. I just cant take sports talk with him he just picks and root for a team that is good or good to like, especially if they are better then the team I root for.

Pick a team and stick with them.
 
I became a Baltimore Ravens fan by a process of elimination.

I live in NJ, I cannot give my loyalty to a team that plays in one state and their name doesn't reflect that. I can't stand anything Philly, so that left me as Baltimore as the closest geographical team to root for.

Though, I also have a soft spot for all Seattle teams, and when it comes to Baseball I'm a Twins fan.
 
Even after last night? :/

hahahaha (nervous laugh)... yeah that was sad

It makes even less sense to root for a team just because you happen to live there/be born there.

Well, for American football I'm a huge Redskins fan. I'm from VA and watched them as a child with my father as they are our home team. It's irrational, I know, but it's nice to have a hometeam who everyone you know watches. There's something fun about it on a primal level.
 
I like the Arizona Cardinals and the Chicago Bears but I don't live in the USA.
I mean, sometimes you don't have to live in the city to like the team. The players, their performances, etc... are more important.
 
I'm not hating on the Bruins at all, the Leafs dun fucked up huge I'm not denying that, nor am I denying anyone the right to cheer on whatever team they like. It's the reasons and mentality behind most of them that are confusing to me and why I made the thread.

You don't know for certain what their reasoning or mentality is for it. You're making an assumption that it's just them wanting to be different, which in some cases it is, but to generalize across all Bruins fans in Toronto is silly.

There's also the fact that a huge chunk of the Leafs "fans" are the same, just towards their own home team. If they're winning: HOORAY! I'm a leafs fan! If they're losing: Leafs who? Hockey is boring.
 
I dunno, in a lot of cases rooting for a different team from your state or country or conference after yours is out of the playoffs seems okay. You just don't get to be as happy as the true fans if that team takes it.
Cheering for the Leafs is wrong.

sant made a good point, though. Essentially: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But I'd say the Leafs are a greater enemy to me than the Bruins. Any fanbase that purports to be "Canada's Team", or has Don Cherry backing, will forever earn my disgust.
 
This infuriates me, I cant take sports seriously with anybody that abandons teams or jump on band wagons when a team gets hot. I was extremely disgusted in my cousin when he dropped the cavaliers like a bad date when Lebron left, he also flip flops all over the place with the NFL. I just cant take sports talk with him he just picks and root for a team that is good or good to like, especially if they are better then the team I root for.

Pick a team and stick with them.
I agree wholeheartedly with the above. But there is ONE exception to this rule.

Fantasy sports. I'm a Bills fan through and through and that loyalty will never change but I will cheer against the Bills when I want them to lose to get a better draft position and I will cheer against the Bills when I have fantasy football players on my fantasy team that are playing against them.

I was wearing NFL jerseys of a half-dozen teams last year. Was it because I had dumped the Bills as a supporter? Hardly. But I was supporting my fantasy players. And when you dabble in fantasy sports, you'll find yourself cheering for teams you've spent a lifetime detesting like the Cowboys just because you have Miles Austin on your fantasy team and you need him to get 100 yards and a touchdown.
 
Hey we cant all be lucky to live in cities w/ pro teams.
Everybody I know with the misfortune of living in Charlotte roots for the Panthers/Bobcats. Most of the state roots for the Panthers (or the Redskins, mainly people over ~25 or so). I root against the Panthers hard because their fans fucking suck IRL.
Nobody else in the state likes the Bobcats because they fucking blow and we have UNC/Duke/State who are actually interesting to follow.
 
I also don't like fans that support both teams in an area. This is actually a minor problem in the Bay Area, where you see punk-asses wearing stuff like this (to be fair, I haven't seen one of these in awhile):

split_hat_crop_north.jpg


I'm sorry, you're either a Giants fan or an A's fan! Pick one and stick with it. You wouldn't see a Mets/Yankees cap in New York, would you?

For transplants, I totally respect it. If you're a real Yankees fan from New York who is living in the Bay now, you rock that Yankees shit. I still don't like your team, but you're a real fan.
 
Since there were no local professional sports teams when I was younger, I still rooted for teams that were close to Oklahoma. So I was mostly went for Cowboys and the Spurs. Since a lot of my extended family were big Packers fans, I got into the Vikings just to be different, which has also stuck.

I went to OU, so that cemented my college sports team. Now since we have the Thunder, I'm a huge fan of them, but I also still like to see the Spurs do well.
 
I support Arsenal though I'm American, primarily because they were the first team I went to see when I studied in England in college. Every other team I support has been local, or where I grew up. My brother is a huge U of Georgia fan, for the sole reason that he loves bulldogs, and they're the biggest team with them as a mascot. That I'm aware of, anyway. THAT is a bizarre reason to support a team. He's never even been to Georgia, as far as I know.
 
I never like any teams in the cities I lived in. I like talking smack to the local team(s) fans when they lose. I would suck one day if I ended up living in one of my team's city.
 
From new York but favorite baseball team is from Seattle. I just liked ken griffey Jr. When I was a kid and have followed them since.

This carried over to being a seahawks fan also.
 
I see this a lot with the Redskins and the Cowboys and it really bothers me even though I'm a Cardinals fan and I only visit St. Louis maybe once a year.

Redskins? Seriously? I find that hard to believe seeing as the Skins have mostly sucked for the past 20 years.

Now in the DC area you will find a lot of Cowboys fans. Some hop on the bandwagon just to be haters and some because their family cheers for the Cowboys. The Redskins were the last team to desegregate since their owner was racist.
 
You don't know for certain what their reasoning or mentality is for it. You're making an assumption that it's just them wanting to be different, which in some cases it is, but to generalize across all Bruins fans in Toronto is silly.

There's also the fact that a huge chunk of the Leafs "fans" are the same, just towards their own home team. If they're winning: HOORAY! I'm a leafs fan! If they're losing: Leafs who? Hockey is boring.

Dude I never once said "everyone who does this is doing it to be different" I asked WHY people do it because to me it seems SOME people do it for that reason.

And yes, Toronto has the most bandwagony fans in the NHL, this is another irritating quality but not really the point of the thread.

Cheering for the Leafs is wrong.

sant made a good point, though. Essentially: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But I'd say the Leafs are a greater enemy to me than the Bruins. Any fanbase that purports to be "Canada's Team", or has Don Cherry backing, will forever earn my disgust.

Why does Vancouver hate Toronto so much? It's not like we've ever had a rivalry or crazy series.

Other than the 2 reasons you posted I mean.
 
I also don't like fans that support both teams in an area. This is actually a minor problem in the Bay Area, where you see punk-asses wearing stuff like this (to be fair, I haven't seen one of these in awhile):

split_hat_crop_north.jpg


I'm sorry, you're either a Giants fan or an A's fan! Pick one and stick with it. You wouldn't see a Mets/Yankees cap in New York, would you?

For transplants, I totally respect it. If you're a real Yankees fan from New York who is living in the Bay now, you rock that Yankees shit. I still don't like your team, but you're a real fan.

Those weird Yankees/Mets fans are the worst.
 
The Packers and Cornhuskers are the only non-local teams I root for, here in Washington state. At my time of growing up and becoming interested in sports they were each successful(Tom Osborne era and Brett Favre-Homgren) franchises/Universities and they were simply my choice teams. They wore my favorite colors. And from there it grew. Each have such great fan bases, that I'm really proud to consider myself a distant part of it all.

A large factor was me not raised in a sport oriented family. With the exception of my older brother(who was a huge Michael Jordan fan, like anyone else) my family wasn't really into any of it.
 
I posted this in the NHL thread:

Haha well I was born in the US, grew up in NJ and pretty much became a Leafs fan on my own accord. Though Alexander Mogilny helped with that a lot as he was my all time favorite player. Funny as how I was never really a Devils fan.

And I say funny that I was never really a Devils fan because they won the Stanley Cup in 2000 when he was on the team and made it to the SCF the year after. You'd think that with all that success I'd root for my home team. But instead I chose to root for the Maple Leafs even after he went back to the Devils and retired. It went from me liking a certain player to liking the team, despite such a huge playoff drought.
 
I was never into football as a child, despite living an hour from the Dolphins stadium and my dad being an enormous Steelers fan, so I didn't have a favorite team then. Ever since the 2000 Super Bowl I've rooted for the Titans because that is the game that got me into football and I found myself rooting for them during it.

Ever since then I've rooted for them and I find it annoying that I'm called a bandwagoner, who the hell is seriously going to bandwagon the Titans nowadays, or not a real fan because I'm expected to just root for who my parents root for or the team near the city I'm from.
 
That "tribalism" is pretty much the entire point of having city/country based teams and competition.
No, the "point" of having city based teams and competition is that these teams need people to buy tickets and attend the games in order to sustain each franchise. The only logic to it is that an amorphous blob team without a specific location wouldn't be able to exist.
 
That "tribalism" is pretty much the entire point of having city/country based teams and competition.
Maybe that's part of why I don't get sports. It's like people that are REALLY in to being from Chicago or even from the US or whatever.i mean, I like that I live in the US and I don't think I would really want to live anywhere else, but I'm far from FUCK YEAH AMERICA WOO.
 
You are allowed to either root for the team from where you grew up, the team your parents rooted for, or the team from where you live.

If the place you currently live doesn't have a team for that sport you can adopt a team from another city. But if you pick one of the current best teams you suck.
If anything annoys me, its this sort of attitude.

If you cant understand how people can like other teams, its because you're stuck with this close-minded view of how you're supposed to follow sports.

Especially the 'if you pick one of the best teams, you suck'. Like some newcomer to a sport has to pick some crappy-to-mediocre team just so they dont get derided by the people who take this shit way too seriously. I understand why some people start up with a good team. They tend to be more entertaining to watch if they've got talented players and they stand a good chance of winning, which is fun. Its also something they can talk about with others. Dealing with bouts of depression over your favorite team being in a rut is something that I expect loyal fans to deal with, but I'm not gonna blame some newcomer for not wanting to drink the kool-aid with you.

So OP, you take it too seriously and you're just being bitter.
 
i live near cologne but i always supported bayern munich. something i definitely got from my dad who is a bayern fan since the 70s. it sucks that i cannot go to the allianz arena that often :( became a fan around 95/96.
 
Being from LA, I was raised to hate LA teams ;)

Anyway, I've always liked the Colts (Indianapolis) because they had my favorite colors at the time and I liked their logo. They were terrible back then but I did have a really memorable season rooting for them and their improbable run under "Comeback Kid" Jim Harbaugh.

Basketball, I've always hated the Lakers because of the stupid Lakers flags on everyone's cars. I used to watch basketball a lot when I was little and I liked the Jazz first and foremost, I think partly because John Stockton was somebody I could relate to. I was a short kid and he was short but a great passer and playmaker and critical element of the team, and he was workmanlike without being flashy. I also liked Barkley a lot for some contrary reasons ;) I stopped watching basketball for a long time though, as it got really boring to me. Now I just watch the playoffs, and generally root for the Heat to win and the Lakers to lose.

I am a big LA Dodgers and LA Kings fan though. I grudgingly like the Ducks and the Angels too.

Anyway, I don't think it's a big deal to be a fan of a team from another city for whatever reason. As long as you stick with your team and don't hop around every year.

Oh, and the other rule I have is ALWAYS ROOT AGAINST BOSTON. Fuck Boston.
 
Dude I never once said "everyone who does this is doing it to be different" I asked WHY people do it because to me it seems SOME people do it for that reason.

And yes, Toronto has the most bandwagony fans in the NHL, this is another irritating quality but not really the point of the thread.

I gave you a reason why: People connect with that team. Yes, there are people who just want to be "that guy" and have everyone hate his presence, but some legitimately just found another team that appealed to them.

Born and raised in Toronto, but I've never been a Leafs fan. Watched them play the Canucks one night and was a fan up until their god awful sportsmanship during the playoffs. That's another story though.
 
So OP, you take it too seriously and you're just being bitter.

Yes and no. Obviously I'm a little bummed out about the way things went, but I think my question is based in curiosity and not a "fuck you" attitude. I don't think I've posted anything venomous, I'm just asking for reasons.

Oh, and the other rule I have is ALWAYS ROOT AGAINST BOSTON. Fuck Boston.

Well up until this year I was pretty apathetic towards Boston, but now I hate them! Well, the Bruins anyways ;)
 
Also there are plenty of people who wear a Yankee or Cubs cap (any team really) who were born and raised in New York/Chicago but can't name anyone outside the more popular players. Then you have someone from out of town who knows the team inside and out.

Just because you were born and raised in your teams city does not make you a great fan. Just because you were born and raised outside of your teams city does not make you a lousy fan.
 
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