A Slice Of Home

When I was still working at Gillette another co-worker and I used to make a bet on game days on just how many opposing team fans would show up and fill in the expensive seats. I would throw out a number of how many I thought would be on each side of the stadium and then he would take the over or the under. It was originally designed to just be one of those thing you come up with to pass the time when you would rather be anywhere but at work, however I was also using it as an unofficial personal barometer of who had the most loyal fans. I figured this was a better gauge than looking all over the stadium because, not only were these people willing to travel to an away game, they were shelling out the big bucks for Clubhouse seats, proving they weren't just hopping on StubHub for the cheapest available. (If you are interested in the results, they go pretty much how you would expect. The closer the team the more fans were willing to shell out for the good seats since they saved money on travel and while teams which have always had a reputation for traveling well like the Cowboys and Steelers had plenty of representation, I couldn't have set the over/under low enough when it came to the Jacksonville came to town.) But even the Jaguars had a little representation, which just goes to show you that no matter how small you think a team's fanbase may be, they are always a few in every city.

I guess is is because I had this experience of seeing how loyal NFL fans can be that I shouldn't have been surprised when I turned on the TV before last Thursday's Eagles/Chiefs game and discovered that the pre-game show was broadcasting from a Kansas City Chiefs bar in Philadelphia. At first I thought they meant that this bar was the standard meeting place for all the out-of-town fans to take over when their team was playing the Eagles and it was simply a Chiefs bar that weekend, but it turns out this specific location was always a Chiefs-only establishment on NFL Sundays. They had a large collection of memorabilia all over the walls and had always shown Chiefs games, even during lean years. It had even seen a few current Chief players stopped by before the games. First off, who knew that there were enough Kansas City transplants to warrant their own establishment and secondly, why would they all flock to Philadelphia? I was confused on both fronts, but a little research revealed that the original owner of the bar had won a great deal of money when the Chiefs won the Super Bowl in the 70s and gave the bar its theme out of some sense of loyalty to the team and his son, who currently owns the bar, was brought up to root for the Chiefs even though he was raised in Philadelphia. Turns out his father was ahead of his time.

You wouldn't think there would be much of a market in catering to a fanbase whose team plays in a different city from the one in which your bar is located but that is where you are wrong. Not only are there bars like this all over the country, as it turns out the bigger the town the more team-specific bars you can have. It used to be that wandering in and finding a bar which had DirectTV and was showing out-of-town games was all you were ever going to get but at this point it doesn't matter where you live or what team you root for you should be able to find at least one bar where all the fans of your team gather together to watch the games together. For example, in New York there is a separate bar for each NFL team. Or, if that is too specific for you there are bars which caters to fans of certain sports in general, because apparently soccer fans can't stand mingling with football fans and the feeling is quite mutual, which is why there are bars which open early to show Premier League games. Normally I would think a restaurant would want to appeal to as many people as possible but I guess if you crunch the numbers you could say it all makes sense because 10 extremely loyal customers who are going to spend at least 3 hours eating and drinking at your establishment for 16 weeks will bring in more money than 20 guys who watch half a game and then leave never to come back again. I am just not sure I would present this as my business plan when first applying for the loan at the bank.

Normally I am not in favor of separating people into groups like this. I usually think allowing people to only gather with individuals who think exactly as they do is dangerous, small-minded and prevents people from learning how to interact with each other. I would advocate for sticking two groups of people with opposing views in a room because before too long they will see they have more in common than they think and learn to talk out their differences rather than continuing to hate each other based on ignorant and out-dated stereotypes. In this case, as these groups would already have a love of sports to go off of so the process would probably go by very fast. Not to mention I think the reputation of certain fanbases have been greatly exaggerated and while every group is going to have its knuckleheads, 95% of them are well-behaved people who just want to watch the game in a social situation, so we're keeping them apart worrying about fights which probably won't happen. All that being said, not everything in life has to be a teaching moment, especially when alcohol is involved, so I think I am ok with keeping people in their own corners this time. People are passionate about their teams so given how tempers can flare during games I am not sure I would want to have the rival team's bar in a city which means I won't be opening a Jets bar in Boston any time soon, no matter how profitable it would be. Or a Jaguars bar anywhere, because I am pretty sure those don't even make money in Jacksonville.