Bailing Out on Your Team When They Are Losing and Other Displays of Bad Behaviour by Sports Fans
Shôn Ellerton, March 24, 2026
Surely it can’t be that difficult to be courteous and respectful as a sports fan? Appears it is for many out there.
Is it polite to leave the table without asking?
No.
And neither is it polite for so-called supporters of the losing team to unceremoniously leave the stadium en masse knowing there is no hope of claiming a victory. And I use the word, supporters, sparingly, because true supporters would be cheering their team to the very end regardless of winning or losing.
Oh! The excuses!
Avoiding the traffic.
Avoiding queueing for public transportation.
Getting to the bars and restaurants before everyone else.
Whatever.
Unless there is a an actual valid reason for leaving, like an emergency, those who abandon their losing team can’t really be called supporters.
I’ve not been to many packed out stadium games in my life, but the reason is simple. I feel genuinely uncomfortable in crowds. I’d rather sit in a pub that sells nice beer and watch the game with mates rather than queue up at the stadium bar to get a flimsy plastic receptacle of lukewarm overpriced average beer.
I first noticed this disappointing non-supportive behaviour of fans leaving early because their team are losing when I first went to see a premier league soccer match in Cardiff during the late 80s. Can’t remember who were playing but nearly the entire crowd emptied the stadium leaving a cohort of stoic supporters behind to give as much support as they can to lift up the already dampened spirits of the losing team. Clearly, it was a game in which the fans of the winning team were far and few to begin with.
I thought to myself, ‘Seriously? You’re all just going to bugger off now?’
There is almost zero etiquette within the crowds in British football.
I don’t want to delve into the politics of hooliganism, but I kid you not, this is how they have to handle the movement of fans of rival teams at the Cardiff Stadium.
The M4 motorway skirts Cardiff to the north with two main exits. Bus drivers are informed that they are to take the allocated exit depending on what fans are on the bus. Seriously, I’ve driven down the M4 on football match days and have seen those illuminated dot-matrix road signs telling such and such fans to proceed down this exit or the next to avoid any confrontation.
The fans of the rival teams arrive from different directions at different times. They are chaperoned in their respective areas withing the confines of the stadium.
It’s nuts!
I hate it when sports go full-out tribal and I especially hate when the fans lose any sense of etiquette and let their passions override their manners to others.
I remember going to a Port Adelaide match at the now-decommissioned West Lakes Stadium some years ago in western Adelaide. The company I worked for had a box there and my team and I took our Optus client, a very keen Port Adelaide fan, there on a business networking event. He had since retired many years ago as of writing this piece.
Anyway, he knew every number, every statistic, every player’s name, and every single match in Port Adelaide’s history since the dawn of time. He had this massive spreadsheet at home and took with him a notepad and paper to record every little bit of information.
When Port was ahead, he would be the happiest and nicest man alive, cheering ebulliently and joyfully.
However, when things didn’t go quite so well, he morphed into Mr Hyde and became the focus of attention by the surrounding fans.
Remember, there are families with kids who go to these events.
On this occasion, Port Adelaide did not do well and he became so heated that he barked out a slew of utterly disdainful words at the top of his voice.
‘You f***ing c**ksu**ing bastards, there’s f***ing big spaces you left open, you bunch of useless little sh*ts!’
Edging away from him in embarrassment, I felt scores of eyes, kids with mouths open, and looks of deep disapproval focussed on us. Now, this was a man who should leave early, but by doing so, he’d miss out on capturing some vital stat. However, instead of departing in disgust, hurling abuse was his preferred method.
Not every sport is like this.
I didn’t see such bad behaviour during rugby matches in the UK. It’s certainly true that the fighting and the violence is on the pitch rather than in the crowds unlike some of the soccer matches I’ve been to.
There’s something odd about all this.
And it could partly be to do about scoring.
Numbers, in general.
And this is particularly acute with soccer because scoring is very simple with many games never exceeding two digits in terms of points. Unlike American football, Australian Rules Football, Rugby League, basketball, and many other sports. In soccer, each goal is one point.
That’s it!
Each point is a gem, a diamond, a nugget of gold. And because each point is so scarce, the tribalism gets heated to extraordinary proportions. Commentators resort to paramilitary phrases to emphasise the message.
Sports with complex scoring systems tend not to get such bad behaviour in general. For example, cricket, a pastime steeped in tradition, etiquette, and composure boasts a scoring system no one understands unless you’re really into cricket.
Also, there are three different kinds of sports spectators.
The first kind is the ‘winning is more important than the actual spectacle’ person, the second is the ‘spectacle of watching the game is more important than who’s going to win it’ person, and the third is the ‘I put a bet on this team and don’t care about anything else’.
The first kind places high priority on who’s going to win. They support teams they like. They hate teams they dislike. They cheer their side. They boo the other side. They celebrate to the ends of the Earth when their team wins. The plod home miserably and don’t want to talk about it when their team loses.
The second kind couldn’t give an actual f**k who wins or loses. They enjoy watching the spectacle of highly skilled professional players battling it out against each other. They know too well that each player is a human being who made it to the top of the pyramid in a highly competitive market. They also frown upon bad behaviour and want to enjoy the game without fear of being sat in the ‘wrong’ area of the stadium or wearing the wrong colour of clothing.
The third kind can overlap with the first two. These are the gamblers who place bets on anything. The most important thing is winning the money.
Unfortunately, the first kind is far more common than the second kind.
However, we also need those of the first kind because, paradoxically, if we don’t have them, one has to ask the question of what impetus drives the whole sports machine in the first place to such big numbers and competitiveness.
But there is also solid rivalry between other sports but displayed in somewhat different ways without resorting to bad behaviour or mouthing off in front of families and children who just want to enjoy the game.
For example, nothing could be more different than the famous boat races between Cambridge and Oxford. Now, truth be told, this is one extremely intense sport which I never encountered elsewhere, although when you watch it, it looks rather ‘nice’. I gave it a brief shot of it on a river in Bedford in England. Rowing these boats feels like your heart is being literally ripped out of you. It’s pure pain.
The rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford is intense but instead of the name-calling, the bad language, the bad behaviour, it is translated into quite clever and wicked sophisticated sarcasm, something which the British elite are notoriously infamous for.
Go into a gent’s toilet in the heart of a Cambridge college and you might come across graffiti on the door that says something like, ‘Metaphysics is like an erection, the more you think you about it, the harder it gets.’
That’s their idea of a crude joke!
Lastly, I want to raise the issue of seriously bad behaviour at kids’ sports matches.
Kid’s sports matches are supposed to be fun and safe. A nice day out to enjoy watching the kids play footy, soccer, or whatever. A BBQ is smoking hot serving piping hot hamburgers and bacon sandwiches. There’s a coffee hut serving fresh hot coffee and ice cold smoothies and a bar serving wine and beer.
Then you’ve got some tosser loser parent who shouts at the referee, usually a youngster in an older division learning the ropes of being a referee, who might have made a simple mistake. Worse, you get this nastiness from some parents who hurl abuse at kids from the other team who just so happen to be beating the team which their own kids are on.
This is utterly despicable behaviour and should I had any authority to kick them out of the ground if I was part of the ground staff, I would have done so in an instant. If the Speaker of the House can kick out parliamentarians for an hour or so for being badly behaved under Rule 94A, then damn it, so should those who referee the game. Truth is, those parents who hurl abuse and literally lose their minds for the sake of a simple game are feral and the referees are rightfully afraid of them. And hardly anyone will back them up, because Australian and British mentality tends to veer on that mindset of trying not to make a fuss preferring not to be involved.
This is why Australian government is what it is today!
Overall, I think sports plays a very important part of human development, a great source of entertainment, and generally, a good way to be fit and enjoy being with other people. But goodness, there are so many sports fans out there, most of which do not play sports themselves, who need to calm the f*ck down, regain whatever composure they lost, because that is what makes sports ugly and nasty.
And please.
For the sake and goodwill of any team that you support, I hope you stay to the bitter end of the game, even if they are losing.
Because that is the time they need you the most.
