Let me be clear: I have no problem nor exhibit no shame in backing the clear favorite.  In supporting the teams that you love to hate.  I prefer dynasties to Cinderella stories.  I would, unless it is a team that I truly loathe like the Yankees, Cowboys, or Penguins, rather see the prohibitive, odds-on favorite prevail.  The narrative of enduring greatness strikes a deep chord within me.  While they were never MY teams, I pulled for the Showtime Lakers, Jordan’s Bulls, and Brady’s Pats.  I have always wanted to be witness to greatness during my lifetime and will actively support it.  In short, I root for the overdog.

My two great sporting loves—the Duke Blue Devils and Manchester United Football Club—both came to me fairly organically and before their meteoric rises, but I have relished basking in the glow of their respective successes and triumphs while flaunting this enjoyment in full view of the rival fans of less-successful teams.  I became a Duke fan watching their unsuccessful run to the NCAA Championship in 1986 and have unapologetically backed hated heels like Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley, Carlos Boozer, JJ Redick, and Austin Rivers ever since.  With Manchester United, I simply asked my Liverpool-supporting Irish friends in 1995 which team they loathed to better rile them with my fandom; and thus began my decades-long support for the Red Devils, King Cantona’s haughtiness, David Beckham’s bending balls, and Sir Alex Ferguson’s gloriously ruddy visage, all of which produced trophies galore.

The benefits of backing an overdog are numerous: your team’s games are more accessible and easier to watch, your triumphs more frequent, and knowledge of your teams and their players more common for conversation with generally-knowledgeable sports fans.  You don’t have to buy expensive, obscure subscriptions to regional sports networks to catch most games.  You can reliably count on a championship, trophy, or league crown every 2-3 years.  And most other fans worth their sports salt will know your players and your coach and will be willing to talk to you about your team, either out of grudging respect or visceral dislike.  Make no mistake, you want your team to continue to be hated.  Because true sports hate stems from resentment born of envy; the day other fans stop hating your team and become apathetic is the day it has lost its grasp on greatness.  Why is why I embrace the sports hate, knowing that it speaks not only of sustained relevance but of established greatness born of years of empire-building that is difficult to maintain.

There remain, however, numerous perils to rooting for the overdog.  First, there are always the allegations of front-running or bandwagon fandom.  Second, when your teams invariably do lose—and all sports teams lose more than they win—other fans of every team will engage in gleeful schadenfreude as you mourn your losses and lick your wounds.  And third, and perhaps most relevant to the current sports era, is the price that highly-successful teams are increasingly willing to pay to sustain their greatness or profitability.  It might come in the form of compromised values.  It is often the prioritization of money over the fandom.  The qualities that bring a fan base together over shared love of team can just as easily be undermined by greedy owners, soulless sponsors, or mercenary players.  Two recent phenomena involving my beloved Blue Devils and Red Devils bring these potential perils into clear relief.

Allow me to begin with Manchester United, as I perceive their sins to be greater and more emblematic of many of the problems embedded in sport today more broadly.  Manchester United has been a cash cow for years now, building a global brand and empire on the back of Sir Alex Ferguson’s run-away success in the English Premier League (EPL) in the decades of the 1990s and 2000s.  The brand was built on the locks of David Beckham and the legs of Cristiano Ronaldo and other media-friendly superstars as the EPL was broadcast all over the world to adoring fans in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  Even in the remotest refugee camps in Central African Republic, I was sure to see a red Man United jersey.  They left no commercial stone unturned in their relentless pursuit of wealth.  But the product, until recently, was always good and left little room for complaint as they won 13 Premier League titles, five FA Cups, and two Champions Leagues under Ferguson’s steady, iconic leadership.

Since Ferguson retirement in 2013, the on-field product has suffered considerably, but this dip in form routinely happens after when a legend leaves (which is ominous for my other favorite team).  What has so irked Red Devils fans, however, is the fact that team management and especially ownership seem content with on-field mediocrity as long as the advertising, sponsorship, and merchandizing dollars continue to flow in undimmed.  ManU have become more of a brand than a football team.  Its avaricious owners, the American Glazer family that owns the recently-crowned Tampa Bay Buccaneers, bought the club using a massive leveraged buy-out (that remains financially sketchy as hell) while bleeding the club of cash and paying out large dividends in the aftermath.  Yes, ManU still has one of the highest payrolls in the soccer world, but fans, including myself, can’t shake the feeling that the team is seen a mint instead of association football (hence the name “soccer”) that brings supporters together for common cause.  Granted, United are not owned by a shady Russian oligarch (cough*Chelsea*cough) or a corrupt autocratic sovereign wealth fund (ahem, Man City), but the club is very far from its roots in local, community-based ownership.  So we are left with a mercenary club, owners who care more about profits than product, and a rift between fans and ownership.

Which brings us to the debacle that was the European Super League.  In perhaps the most blatant cash grab of cash grabs, 12 of the preeminent European soccer clubs, Manchester United among them, tried to form a break-away mid-week league to ensure high-profile matchups but also, more importantly, a massive, guaranteed revenue stream.  That this project fell apart last week in spectacular fashion in a matter of two days is a testament to the enduring power of fans and their continuing impact on the sport.  But never were the mercenary intentions of these owners laid barer.  Never had their contempt for fans been more obvious.  Never had the bottom line so clearly been the headline: owners sell out their fans and sell their souls for promised billions.  The backtracking and empty apologies of the last several days have been as hysterical as they are insincere.  But it does make it difficult to back one of these mega-clubs.  To know that the people running the place don’t give a fuck about tradition, or rivalries, or fans, or really sport.  One of the beauties of soccer is the threat of relegation: that poor performance can result in demotion from the top leagues and that failure has consequence for all teams rich and poor.  These owners attempted to remove consequences.  To erase tradition.  And sully the game.  It’s tough to stand by and tacitly support that.  The robber barons storming the castle have been fended off for now.  But they’ll be back.  The cash at-hand is too tempting.  Ready to loot our leagues and pillage our traditions.

Which brings me to my other favorite team: the widely-despised Duke Blue Devils, whose sins I believe to be of a much more venial variety.  As many of you will know, I wear my love for Duke both on and under my sleeve (I have a Blue Devil tattoo on my left bicep).  I don’t quite live and die with every victory and loss as I once did, and my love for more recent stars like Zion Williamson, Jason Tatum, and Kyrie Irving cannot match my attachment to former players like Grant Hill, Nolan Smith, or Bobby Hurley.  And I don’t quite spew as much profanity at the refs and opposing players as I once did (though a UNC game will definitely rile me up as much as it ever has).  But despite my mildly more mature fandom, I still watch every game, read every Duke article I find online, track our recruiting, and listen to Duke-based podcasts.

Part of my more mellow approach to following Duke is undoubtedly the result of age; but the other part of my somewhat dampened attachment to the team is the result of most good players staying only for a cup of coffee.  The one-and-done phenomenon is certainly not unique to Duke, but because of its high profile, its continued success, and its legendary coach, the program has attracted more of these transcendent but ephemeral talents.  So while it was amazing to watch Zion’s gravity-defying feats for a year, I will always be more attached to four-year guys like Quinn Cook, Billy King, Robert Brickey, or Tommy Amaker.  You just can’t muster the same loyalty or develop the same attachment to players (and by extension the program) who only stick around for a year.  Which brings us back to money.

The lure of the NBA and its promised millions will always loom large in the collective imagination of players, and this is as it should be.  I’m not here to tell teenagers that they shouldn’t be able to capitalize upon their talents and earn lifechanging sums of money.  Once a kid is 18, they should be able to ply their trade as they see fit; we don’t tell computer programmers or budding entrepreneurs that they have to attend college, so why should we mandate this for athletes?  But if we are going to have a college basketball system, and if that system involves and values education (both for the player’s future benefit and for the university’s institutional integrity), there should be a real commitment to attending college.  Personally, I think that all high school players should be allowed to enter the NBA Draft directly, but if they opt to go to college, they should sign on for a two-to-three-year guaranteed window.  This would ensure their commitment to academics as well as the school’s athletics, allow for player and personal development, and ensure that the teams had continuity and put a better product on the floor.  It has been great rooting for the best future NBA players in the NCAA, but I would trade that for greater program stability and team success, the likes of which the Gonazagas, Villanovas, and, until recently, UNCs of the world have enjoyed.  Duke gets more in sponsorships deals from Nike and others than these schools, but I would take the greater sense of program cohesion and stability over the ephemeral greatness of one-and-done shooting stars.

I fully realize that issue of the centrality of money to sports is not going away.  It is increasingly a part of the dynamic of every aspect of the games we love and the considerations of the management, coaches, and players of the teams we support.  But there are reasonable constraints to put on the unceasing search for revenues.  We can (and possibly should) punish teams for spitting in the face of tradition.  Would I argue if the six English teams that signed on to the European Super League were all docked 10 points in the EPL?  I would not.  The NCAA continues to be an embarrassment in the way that they unabashedly seek money and sponsorship deals while preventing its players from doing the same.  College players should unequivocally be able to sell their name and likeness rights and be able to benefit from individual sponsorship deals. And almost certainly should be included in the distribution of the massive revenue that they bring in for major college sports.  But the collegiate model can remain collegiate if it actually emphasizes the values it purports to support.

Despite these numerous frustrations, I’m not likely to start rooting for underdogs anytime soon.  It’s just not in my nature.  I love my overdog teams.  And I love that you hate them.  As any true fan knows, you stick with your teams through thick and thin.  It’s just a little harder when you’ve had sustained success because you get spoiled by it.  I just wish that my favorite teams would make it easier to root for them sometimes.  That they cared as much about the things that I and other fans care about.  Or that they prioritized their fans in their decision-making at all.  I have way too much history, emotional investment, and merch to switch to other teams at this point, to say nothing of the pain and expense of tattoo removal.  So here’s hoping that my beloved teams can turn it around and get back to the reasons that I loved them in the first place.