96 college football games will be played from Thursday to Monday, meaning 192 teams will take the field over five days. It doesn’t take much scrolling through the list of games on ESPN’s website to notice the section labeled “TICKETS” listing the lowest available admission price for each game.
At its core, sports is a business and the games are a product. The consumers are the thousands upon thousands of fans who will fill the stands of stadiums across the country to view. On the surface, the only tangible benefit is the money these games bring in for the teams and sponsors that allow these events to happen.
Sales, dictated by fans, are the lifeblood of sports and are why the title of sports marketer is the fifth highest-paying job in sports with a national average salary of $62,825.
Some may look at this and conclude the sports industry is nothing more than a cash grab, in which those who bring in the most money make the most money. However, the benefits of sports extend far beyond the benefits to sports teams and the industry itself.
A March 2023 study conducted by Anglia Ruskin University found that there are, in fact, individual benefits to attending live sporting events. More specifically, the study showed that attending live sporting events improves well-being while reducing feelings of loneliness.
The study, which looked at 7,209 participants aged 16-85 years old, showed notable improvements to two factors: life satisfaction and a sense of “life being worthwhile,” as ARU stated.
These qualifications are subjective and difficult to categorize beyond basic human feeling. However, they have been shown to have tangible, objective benefits to health. The National Library of Medicine evaluated 35 indicators — physical, behavioral and psychosocial — linked to life satisfaction, and found that with a positive change to life satisfaction, improvements in those indicators occurred.
Some of those indicators were mortality, number of chronic conditions, risk of sleep problems and overall optimism. Those among the participants who had experienced higher life satisfaction saw an improvement in almost all indicators, although there was no association with specific health conditions.
Humans are social creatures, wired to build communities and interact among their peers. Attending a live sporting event at any level is essentially a gateway to surefire social interaction, direct or indirect.
Whether rooting for a team with a friend or joining in on a stadium-wide chant, interaction like this has been proven to improve mental health, decrease loneliness and thus improve the health indicators associated with life satisfaction.
Even better, as the lead author of the Anglia Ruskin University study and head of the School of Psychology and Sport Science at Anglia Ruskin University Helen Keyes said, all sporting events, regardless of size, lead to many opportunities for this beneficial social interaction.
Further research, as Keyes said, has to be done to see if the benefits are more pronounced at higher levels, but nothing has shown that low-level sporting events do not provide benefits.
For students at Ohio University, select teams’ home games are free to attend, meaning that by attending and supporting events like football, men’s and women’s basketball, and volleyball games, students are also improving their well-being without a hit to their finances.
Logan Adams is a junior studying journalism. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk more about it? Let Logan know by tweeting him @LoganA_NBA.
