David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, asks why Americans are so obsessed with watching sports. The answer: because they’re lazy, primitive and obsessed with belonging to a group. He argues that the behaviour of sports fans is “normally done by pigs, in the mud, or by seedlings, lacking a firm grip on reality.” As opposed to the behaviour of someone who writes a thousand-word academic article about how much he hates sports fandom; that’s perfectly normal.