The Worst Fan Bases in Sports

Remember when you played Little League (or AYSO, or Pop Warner football) as a kid?

Remember how your coaches – mostly dads – grilled into your gray matter the importance of sportsmanship?

Remember when you were taught as a youngster how to always treat your opponents with kindness, give them a cheer, and shake their hands after the game? 

Well, these are the fan bases in sports where those who ally themselves with them are expected to completely forget all of that and be as mean, arrogant, and obnoxious as possible.

These are fans, usually of winning teams, who feel they have a sense of entitlement; who see followers of other teams as lesser beings and let them know that in ways that are not subtle. Drunkenness, vile name calling and fisticuffs are common among these crowds, and to attend games involving these teams while wearing the opponent’s colors is to risk verbal and physical abuse.

Here are the fan bases that are to be avoided; if you encounter them at a sporting event, be sure to run the other way:

Detroit Tigers / Pistons

Fans of the American League’s Tigers and the NBA’s Pistons in the Motor City have long been known for their unpleasantness over the years.

Tiger fans have been infamous for rioting after big victories, most notably after their iconic baseball franchise convincingly won the World Series in 1984. After the last out was recorded, drunken louts roamed the Detroit streets, overturning and burning cars and other various things.

The incident that puts this town’s sports fans on this list, however, happened in 2004 at the Palace of Auburn Hills during a game between the Pistons and the Indiana Pacers.

Then-Pacer Ron Artest, after partaking in a huge bench-clearing brawl, rushed into the stands after having cups of beer thrown at him while resting on the scorer’s table. The rain of malted hops, along with all kinds of verbal epithets that can’t be mentioned here, continued to flow after he was ejected; I’m sure Artest smelled like a brewery when he got back to the Pacers’ locker room.

I think that’s a good illustration of how nasty Detroit fans can be.

Philadelphia Sports Teams

When it comes to professional sports, the term “City of Brotherly Love” is perhaps the biggest oxymoron there is.

How else do you describe a town whose fans have booed Santa Claus and thrown battery-filled snowballs at opposing players? Where filthy invective in the stands is considered normal speech and where even athletes playing for their teams are treated brutally if they don’t produce?

Let’s put it like this: Veterans Stadium, the former home of baseball’s Phillies and the NFL Eagles that was an absolute cookie cutter of a dump with horrible artificial turf, sported a holding cell and a makeshift courtroom in its bowels, complete with a sitting judge, because so many people got into drunken fights and heaved projectiles onto the field.

The Eagles’ current home, Lincoln Financial Field, likewise has a courtroom and a cell for the same reason.

I seriously doubt there are any other sports stadiums that can say they have a jail and a court. That says a lot about Philadelphia fans.

Needless to say, the thought of being an opposing fan in the land of hoagie cheesesteaks and Rocky Balboa gives me shudders, as does the next group of “fans”, the…

Oakland Raiders

Besides the scary Halloween costumes that those silver and black-clad supporters often wear and the usual drunken obnoxiousness that these fans from Northern California’s blue collar East Bay town display, there are two incidents I was told of that illustrate how bad these folks are…

During a game against the Miami Dolphins at the Oakland Coliseum a few years ago, a fan wearing a Dolphins jacket was standing in line to use the restroom when the next thing he knew, his jacket was ripped off his back and urinated on in the bathroom trough.

I was also told of another time when a New York Jets fan wearing a Jets cap was merely sitting in his seat, watching the game and not bothering anyone, when this idiotic thug pulled a knife on him and snarled, “Give me your cap right now!”

Quite unbelievable – getting a deadly weapon pulled on you over a hat.

To say that is overboard would be a significant understatement, and provides a crystal clear picture of what fans of San Francisco’s working class neighbors across the bay are like.

I saved this fan base for last because in my view, they are the absolute worst in the college sports…

USC Trojans

“Arrogance is part of the image that we exude.” -Jason Mangan, manager, USC Trojan Marching Band, 2000.

Thai statement sums up the mentality of the most obnoxious group of fans at the intercollegiate level.

I have always said that the only difference between Trojan and Raider fans is that USC fans have more money and come from well-to-do backgrounds, particularly the alumni.

Trust me when I say this: You do not want to be a fan of the opposing team at the Trojans’ home, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, especially if the opponents are the crosstown UCLA Bruins.

Simply put, you would be asking for it.

Drunkenness from students, alums, and fans alike, obscene gestures, extreme verbal abuse, and the throwing of ice, oranges, tomatoes, and seat cushions – which were thrown on to the field at the 1989 Rose Bowl – are standard procedure among these followers of the Cardinal and Gold.

More than anything else, a culture of arrogance – like in the previous quote – and snobbery pervades the University of Southern California campus and community. T-shirts with slogans such as “My Maid Went To UCLA” and “We’re Not Snobs, We’re Just Better Than You” are commonly worn at games; anyone not wearing the letters U-S-C is seen as a lower class undesirable, and is treated as such.

I have personally encountered this evil arrogance many times as a Los Angeles resident and a UCLA alumnus, so much so that several years ago I vowed to stop attending UCLA-USC sporting events except for football games when the Bruins are the home team.

Plus, being that the Trojans play their games at the edge of South Central L.A., a crime, drug and gang infested area, I avoid the Coliseum like the H1N1 Flu; it’s just not worth the aggravation for me.

However, that doesn’t compare to the story that this elderly lady, a UCLA alum in her 80s who’s one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, told me about how when she went to the Coliseum for a Bruin-Trojan game, USC thugs pretending to be fans spat on her.

Having encountered USC obnoxiousness myself, I honestly was not that surprised at that. But…

If that doesn’t give a blatant picture of what those fans are like, nothing does.

I know that most sports fans would list the New York Yankees’ fan base as being pretty arrogant and bad, particularly people from the New England area. If I were a Boston Red Sox follower, I would list the pinstripe supporters as being the worst myself. 

But the fan bases I have listed here are notorious for being obnoxious, thuggish, and downright scary; these are the people who give sports a bad name, a symbol of everything that is wrong with athletics, whom you just want to shake and say…

“It’s just a game! Get a life!!”

And that is just unfortunate for everyone.