Rival Teams and the People Who Root for Them

They are wearing the wrong jersey.

The rival fan. The person at work who roots for the team you genuinely dislike. The family member whose allegiance produces real friction at Thanksgiving. The stranger in the parking lot whose bumper sticker makes you feel something that probably deserves examination.

Sports rivalry is one of the most honest and least examined places where tribalism operates in ordinary life.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Love your neighbor. The neighbor in Jesus’s framework is specifically the person who is not like you — the Samaritan in the parable is not there by accident. The neighbor is the one whose difference from you is exactly the point. Which means the rival fan, with their annoying loyalty to the wrong program and their completely unjustified confidence that their team is better than yours, qualifies.

Sports rivalry is fun and it is worth preserving. The intensity of caring about the outcome against a specific opponent is one of the things that makes sport meaningful. The problem is not the rivalry. It is when the rivalry migrates from the game into the relationship with the people on the other side of it — when the fan of the rival team becomes genuinely lesser in some way that has nothing to do with which team they root for.

The rival fan got to their loyalty the same way you got to yours: through family, through geography, through the formative moments that connected them to a team before the team had to earn the connection rationally. Their investment is as genuine as yours. Their suffering in a loss is as real as yours. Their joy in a win over you is as legitimate as your joy in a win over them.

Root hard for your team. Disagree vigorously about which program is better. And remember that the person in the other jersey is your neighbor.

The specific named person is the one whose relationship deserves attention.