Why we need more sports
It's a summer like no other in New York this year — one worth reflecting on.
When the Knicks won their first championship since 1973, the city didn't celebrate in fragments. Strangers on the subway, coworkers who agree on nothing, neighbors who had never spoken — for a few weeks, they all shared a single story. For years, people will talk about where they were when the Knicks overcame a 29-point deficit in Game 4. Now the World Cup is doing the same thing, with the final set just outside the city — and half of New York suddenly deciding that Cape Verde is their next travel destination. It's easy to file all this under entertainment. I'd argue it's closer to infrastructure — the social kind we've been quietly losing: a sense of belonging.
Consider what's happened to the places we used to gather. Local news has thinned. Communal institutions have shrunk. The town square migrated online and then curdled into something more like a battlefield. Politics increasingly asks us to sort ourselves into opposing camps. Now AI is beginning to mediate more of our daily interactions — drafting our messages, summarizing our meetings, answering the questions we once brought to another person. Each of these shifts is defensible on its own. Together, they have left most of us with fewer genuine points of human contact than any generation before us.
Sports are one of the few remaining vestiges of community — and they have an unusual property: you don't have to participate to belong. You don't need to be able to run, or to have ever played. Supporting a team is enough. The wellbeing research here is consistent — people who identify with a team tend to report lower loneliness and a stronger sense of belonging, a finding echoed in a 2025 study of nearly a thousand American and English soccer fans. Not because of the games themselves, but because fandom hands you a ready-made community and a shared emotional vocabulary.
That belonging is the part we undervalue, especially now. It lets an investment banker and his parking attendant bond over about the same missed goal. The rivalry is real, but it's a rivalry everyone has agreed to have — bounded, renewable, and ultimately shared. It's one of the last large-scale arenas where disagreement doesn't have to curdle into division.
None of this makes sports a cure for what ails us. But at a moment when so much of public life pulls us apart, and so much of our technology quietly removes the friction of dealing with other humans, it's worth taking seriously the institutions that still reliably bring us together.
The next time a city empties into the streets over a game, it's tempting to see only the spectacle. Look again. What you're actually watching is people remembering, briefly, that they belong to something.