that part about women's sports fans being "strictly there for the physical skill and competitive high achievement" activated my Check That Source alert (when someone characterizes study results in black and white terms like this, you can rest assured they did not read or understand the study itself) and guess what: the study is flawed, and this description of it is even more flawed!
(btw I am a hockey fan and a neuroscientist who spent a couple years spearheading data collection and cleaning for a large-scale longitudinal survey of queer health, plus I've been active in transformative fandom for 25 years, so I may be fairly uniquely positioned to comment on how best to study a fan community anchored by queer women lol)
okay so first of all, it's important to note that the study in question (which is from 2022, not 2024; that error comes from the Forbes article this Instagram post is based on) focused on a smallish Twitter-driven sample of fans of England's national soccer teams, and that the data were collected in June 2020, so covid-related factors almost definitely skewed these results. but also, regardless of that context, they took the wrong methodological approach.
see, there's been tons of research on fans of men's sports teams and their motivations for rooting for their team (or rather their motivations for spending money on their team, which is why this type of research gets funded) but very little on women's sports fanbases, which—as evidenced by the first statistic in the graphic, which I trust more bc it came from a PWHL front office—consist in large part of people who are not interested in men's sports, so their motivations are likely to be very different. the way a researcher should approach a situation like this is by first collecting qualitative data (asking open-ended questions that allow respondents to express themselves in their own words) and then using those responses to develop the items for a quantitative measure (predefined answer options that can be statistically analyzed). instead, they used an existing quantitative measure of motivation that was DEVELOPED FOR MEN'S SPORTS FANS based on THEIR qualitative responses, and just slapped on an additional ~feminism~ variable measured by two items they appear to have fully made up themselves: "Supporting the Lionesses helps me to use my voice to discuss gender inequality" and "My support of the Lionesses is entangled with my feminist identity". if the respondents' actual motivations didn't fit in those boxes, they didn't count. I promise you a LOT of people quit the survey without finishing because of this, and a disproportionate percentage of those lost responses would have been queer. (queer people haaaaate quantitative measures, I cannot count the number of times I've had to explain to an angry elderly lesbian why she can't write in her own answer on a Likert scale.)
in addition, the 70% vs 54% statistic does not refer to "serious fans" (this is an error in the Instagram graphic, not the Forbes article)—it's a measure of team identification, meaning how psychologically connected you feel with the team. it's not how big a fan you are, it's how much you feel like the team is part of who you are. this is certain to be influenced by the fact that these were national team fanbases, so national pride obviously would have been a factor there—not to mention the oh-so-small detail that England's women's soccer team, unlike the men's team, wins. and the measure they used for team identification was also developed for fans of men's sports, so it doesn't take into account concepts like, y'know, representation. a woman watching women perform incredible feats of athleticism in a sport long-dominated by men is coming from a fundamentally different emotional place than a man watching men do the same thing. (trans/nb perspectives are a whole nother bucket of pucks, and I bet qualitatively studying us specifically in the context of sports fandom would yield some fascinating shit, but I digress.)
here's the kicker: the results on motivation did not significantly differ between fans of the men's team vs fans of the women's team. the "family" variable did rank last... for BOTH. the "physical skill" and "achievement" variables did rank first... for BOTH. this study does not in any way support any of the points Lindsey Darvin is trying to make in that article! I fully agree with the premise that women's team fanbases are different from men's and should be marketed to differently, but empirically we still do not know what those differences are.
thank you for coming to my accidental TED talk and good day to everyone except Lindsey Darvin, who needs to learn how to read a goddamn abstract. the end
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