What Makes a Plastic Fan "Plastic"?
You’ve spent years watching your team deal with bad losses, failed deals, and countless rebuilds. You could have stopped watching a couple years back, but you’ve decided to ride out the bad times; they’re your team after all.
Finally, you start to see a glimmer of hope. the times of losing records and organizational ineptitude may finally be coming to an end.
Then, you see a sudden spike in fan interest from those same people that would bash the very team you’ve been rooting for....
I’m certain you’ve probably dealt with these kinds of fans before, haven’t you? They’ve been called “fair weather fans”, “Bandwagoners”, and “Plastics”.
Even though I research and champion fandoms of all kind, there have been sometimes when I’ve been irked by certain fanbases.
There is no better example of this than what happened to me this past week. Like many fans of Major League Soccer, I was pulling for the Vancouver Whitecaps to beat Inter Miami in this year’s MLS Cup. Soccer fans have made the displeasure known about Inter Miami, as they’ve called bias on certain actions that the team has made on and off the field.
My rooting interest wasn’t so much focused on these claims of bias, as I was more focused on writing about how the same fans we met a couple weeks ago in Flags of Our Fans were going to be celebrating their first title while fighting against relocation rumors.
Of course, that article wasn’t going to be written and the claims of bias silenced as Inter Miami won the MLS Cup handidly.
Like many fans, I was irked. then, a friend in a group chat proposed an idea that I hadn’t considered before: “What makes a bandwagon fan ?”
That question has since become the most engaged prompt I’ve made since I started this project and left me sifting through 100+ answers.
As always, here’s what the fans had to say..