What the Arts Can Learn From Sports
The World Cup is back in America, and it has me thinking about how we build fans
In 1994 I fell in love with soccer because the World Cup was in the United States for the first time. It served as a distraction for me while other things in my life were not going well. I dove fully into the teams and the players. Back then there were preview magazines you could buy, and I had every one of them. I memorized as many details about the people and countries involved as I could before a single game was played. I got to know the personalities: colorful Mexican goalie Jorge Campos, Italian striker Roberto Baggio, Bulgarian star Hristo Stoichkov, and of course the American team filled with players I vividly remember today. I also remember watching the final between Brazil and Italy (I had settled on the Azzurri as my favorite by then) and feeling like it was such a terrible game, like it didn’t live up to everything that led us there. It didn’t matter. I was hooked.
With the World Cup back in the United States now, I can’t help but think back on those days and on how impactful that experience was for me, both personally and professionally. When I got to college, I started house managing at the performing arts center on campus and fell in love with meeting all the artists we brought in. The arts felt like sports to me. I got to experience them from behind the scenes, and I felt the inescapable draw of these artists and their stories.
I started my career as a publicist for The Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia. Since it was my job to pitch news stories, I began to see a hole in how the arts presented themselves, one that the sports world had figured out brilliantly: focusing less on the final product and more on the process.
It’s safe to say that sports teams have dedicated fans. They tune into every game, travel to support their team, and talk about every aspect of it with friends and colleagues. But if you were to look objectively at the quality of each individual game or contest, I suspect you’d find that the vast majority of them are not of the highest quality, like that 1994 final. Sure, there are moments and exceptions, but not every game can be a barn burner with high stakes and endless action.
And here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. Fans stay rabid through the mediocre games because their investment was never only in the game itself. Sports figured out long ago that opening the doors to the stories and the players behind the scenes is what builds the bond. Fans develop emotional ties to players and franchises through a deeper understanding of process. It shows up everywhere. Who is showing up to training camp? Will they make the team, or get cut? Is that draft pick going to pan out? That player went to my college and I loved him there. Did you see what the coach said in that press conference? There are countless moments we get to experience with our favorite teams, and every one of them deepens our investment.
Like many in the arts field, I have been lucky to experience our shows from the inside. I got to meet the casts, sit in on rehearsals, and witness all the work that led to putting a show on stage.
But our audiences rarely got to experience those intimate and illuminating moments. And often, the closest look inside was reserved for our most significant donors.
Collectively, we are hyper focused on the final product, on what the audience sees after they buy a ticket and attend a performance. That focus matters, and magical artistic experiences are happening every single night.
But this approach may have made more sense in an earlier era, when society did more to teach us about the art forms themselves. People grew up with some understanding of what ballet was, or why a piece of classical music was so layered. We don’t have that shared baseline anymore. Our audiences no longer arrive at the same starting place we do as artists, and without that common ground, the whole thing starts to feel transactional. Buy a ticket, and the show had better be great. Don’t take a chance on something you’ve never heard of, because you don’t know what it’s about. We have lost the on-ramp that used to bring people into the work, and we haven’t built a new one.
I think we are missing an opportunity to develop rabid fans of our art, and the fix is to open up our process a great deal more. To bring our followers behind the scenes far more often, and to let them be part of the act of creation. To let them truly understand who the players are, why they are taking the risk, and what they are trying to achieve with this particular work of art.
I’ll dive into how we might actually do this, alongside everything else the field is juggling, in future posts. But for now, while we get absorbed in the world’s game being played in our own backyard, I want to posit that the sports world may have already solved how we expand our dedicated audience base. We just need to open ourselves up to the examples they have been giving us all along.