My friend’s 8-year-old son wept when the 49ers lost. At last, he saw the team exhaust its magic and surrender to the inevitable. The Niners broke, and he broke with them.
I keep returning to that moment, of watching that little kid cry, and what sticks with me is how badly I envy the ability to be that kind of self-contained sad. Soon, he will know memes. He will venture into Discords, and scroll across skeets, and encounter the weird online guys. But not yet. He wasn’t scrubbing his timeline to avoid “fraud” allegations. He wasn’t lamenting the missed opportunity to shove it in the faces of his friends who root for the Seahawks.
He was just sad. He loved something, and it failed. And it hurt.
For a lot of us — the Very Online, in particular — that kind of fandom is getting harder to access. Not because we care less, but because the cost of caring feels different. For those who can’t log off? Your pain feels suspiciously like content.
This is modern sports discourse in an online world. It does not find your rooting interests endearing. Instead, it punishes them. It drowns your earnest love in bile and wrenches open the floodgates for a million grave-dancing strangers. You need only an active Bluesky account and to love a team that routinely chokes away victory to know the feeling: a phantom vibration of a hundred notifications yet to be received, a visualization of the wall of sardonic text broken up only by Shellshocked Shanahans and Crying Jordans and the reminder that there have been like 12 Jurassic Park movies released since your team last won the Super Bowl.
And, look, this isn’t new. Hating is the oldest pastime in sports; the Romans rioted over chariot races; soccer hooligans have been breaking noses for a century. Navigating haters is part of the fabric of sport; the difference now is that the scale is bigger, by orders of magnitude. We have industrialized haterism. Don’t like it? Cry more.
For most people, this isn’t a big deal. They close the social media app and touch grass. God bless those souls who still paint their faces for Jets games. The 1.2 million people who go to NFL stadiums every weekend are wearing jerseys of players who have never won a damn thing, and throwing beer on each other, and crying on TV, but then they just go home and run it back next week. I envy that amnesia: the ability to be earnest without it feeling like a liability. My skin may be thinning as I get older, or maybe I’ve let the brain-poison of the timeline seep in too deep, but a loss doesn’t feel like “just” a loss to me anymore.
This is why we built the Spite Games.
The Very Online have birthed a new way to root for sports, and I’m complicit. Rather than log off, we’ve become less invested in winning and more averse to emotional risk. We hedge instead of hope. The central tenet of the Spite Games is this: I may not get the joy of winning, but at least I can mitigate the sadness of losing. You think you hate the 49ers? Try being one of their fans. I’ve known this season was over from the second Nick Bosa got hurt in September. I refuse to let myself feel heartbroken in the playoffs when I know my team’s been playing with house money the whole time.
This all sucks, very much. It’s a cynical and cowardly approach to being a fan. I would rather not participate in the Spite Games. I would rather be a face painter. Why I and my Very Online brethren can’t simply log off does bear investigating, and I have some thoughts, but first … here, written out for the first time ever, are the Spite Games rules:
1. Kill Your Hope. You never, ever admit you think your team will win. That’s pure chum for these monsters. Instead, you post things like, “Ready to get hurt again” or “Can’t wait to watch these frauds break my heart.” This is your armor. You can’t be disappointed if you’re already dead inside.
2. Get Real Familiar With The Cry-Laughing Emoji. The “cry-laughing” emoji has become the defining hieroglyph of our era not because it is clever, but because it is easy. It is a one-tap solution. It is a shield; it is a gun. It is chillingly efficient, simultaneously invalidating the idea that you care, while body-slamming some fool unfortunate enough to have posted an earnest take. You’re hurting? That’s hilarious! Not me, though. I’m not mad. I’m laughing, actually!
3. The Outcome Always Matters. In a healthy world, 30 NFL fan bases would be ambivalent about a Super Bowl their teams aren’t playing in. Buddy, this ain’t that world. In the Spite Games, you’ve always got skin in a zero-sum game. We must attach profound moral weight to the outcome. Here’s how we set it up: If the Patriots lose, it’s a victory for America, because MAGA will be mad. If the Seahawks lose, they’ll have won the same number of Super Bowls as the Niners this year, so they can share in our misery. We aren’t rooting for a team; we are rooting against avatars. It’s all about the group of people you would most like to see pissed off by the outcome.
It’s a ridiculous orientation, objectively, but I also deeply get it. I understand why one would hedge against the feel-bad risk in a dozen familiar ways and get Mad About Sports Online. Let’s take the venom out of everything coming down the pike by inoculating ourselves first. The safest and saddest way to be a fan of a team is how I’ve come to do it: get cozy with the pain before it hits.
I remember a time when I used to be able to take a beat and just tell the crying 8-year-old inside myself, c’mon, it’s just a game. But it feels less convincing now, because the specter of a loss has mutated into something more uncomfortable. It is no longer just that we must cope with liking a loser; it is the terror of having your identity publicly attached to it. Every fan now risks becoming the meme. I’m not a 49ers fan; I’m Kyle Shanahan curled on the floor, clutching a football, staring into the abyss after another Super Bowl choke, with something rude superimposed in Impact typeface.
Why is it like this? Why participate? The easy answer is that we’re all just playing the game the social media algorithms have taught us to play. It’s no stretch at all to blame the billionaires and their anger-farming apps for homogenizing the language we use to discuss everything. And yes, the tools are broken. But surely, we can simply just … not use them for a while, right?
I try my best to opt out. I hate trash talk, the performative cruelty of it, the way it makes things feel personal and unnecessarily raises the stakes for something that truly doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. So, sure, I’ll temper my participation in the Spite Games, but only a little. I don’t rub it in against fans of rival teams, just screenshot their meltdowns and share them with my friends. Or I’ll save my responses to loudmouth fans for after my team has beaten theirs and shut them up, but I won’t be the one to instigate. I guess that feels better? It’s still a feast on sadness, even if it is a more benign way to partake in something I know to be rotten.
It all begs the question: What am I still doing here? Why can’t I stop consuming this kind of discourse, no matter how bad it feels?
The answer that feels most honest is that I’m inoculating myself, over and again. I feel a desperation to build a tolerance, not to the feeling of losing, but to the way we’ve come to talk to each other about it. I know the trolls are lurking incessantly in this space, baring teeth cut on stuff much harder and sharper than sports. Yet, reflexively, out comes the phone in those moments where I should probably be allowing myself to just sit and feel bummed out because of what’s on the TV. Maybe the thought is that if I keep getting exposure to things that make me feel bad, I’ll become one of those fans I envy, who can just let the accompanying hate roll off their backs.
So far: nope.
My grief is for a space that often feels crueler than it needs to be. It’s tempting, then, to consider trading the raw, careening highs and lows of earnest fandom for a steady, low-grade hum of cynicism. It might feel like we can protect ourselves from the heartbreak of losing by suggesting that, instead, the humiliation of the other guys is just as good.
Thinking about my friend’s son, weeping over a football game, I must ask myself in this moment: How much better would I say I feel now, exactly, having gone through all the machinations and armor and snark and spite? How does it compare to a brief bout of honest letdown in front of my family and friends?
I have to admit: I don’t think anybody wins the Spite Games.
Eventually, that kid will figure out that he can try to bypass his sadness. He’ll learn that he can always just laugh at a Cowboys fan to make himself feel better about a 49ers loss. The world will teach him not to feel it so deeply.
Until then: Cry more.
Follow Travis Souders on Bluesky at @travissouders.bsky.social