Sports following and social capital in the United States: Social networks and trust

Abstract

Scholarship on sports following represents a burgeoning field of inquiry in the sociology of sport, yet sport following's connections to, or ability to facilitate, social capital remains underexplored. Drawing on a contemporary nationwide survey of the United States and employing the foundational theories of social capital by which we operationalize statistical analyses using regression modeling, this study investigates the nuanced contributions of sports following to various dimensions of social capital. Our analysis reveals complex relationships of sports following to social network size, community engagement, neighborhood trust, and social network variety, highlighting sports following as a significant predictor for all our operationalized social capital measures, although negatively so for neighborhood trust. Exploring the interplay between sports following, individual characteristics, and socio-political affiliations, results underscore the powerful predictive capacity of sports following even controlling for other characteristics, highlighting strong potentiality for building social capital, although along some dimensions more than others. These findings spotlight the domain of sports following as fertile ground for further investigation into its capacity to serve as a unique facilitator of social capital on the increasingly divided American socio-cultural landscape.