Hear Me Out: Are sports fans and pop fangirls two sides of the same coin?

They are obsessive, they are devoted. They plan their days around the next televised performance. They scream when the display of artistry in front of them hits its crescendo. They wear shirts stamped with the names of their idols and hoard merchandise and spend eye-watering sums of money on tickets. 

Sound familiar? Hint: I’m not talking about the tens of thousands of Little Monsters who will flock to the National Stadium in May for the Lady Gaga shows, or their ilk. 

No, these fans are all around you, showing up to family gatherings in a Manchester United jersey, texting you “YNWA” when you tell them about the rough patch you’re going through.  

Ah, football fans. Love them or hate them, we’ve accepted them as a part of the wallpaper. 

I get it. I spent the better part of my teenage years losing sleep to 3am La Liga matches buffering on a dodgy streaming site. I ran a Tumblr blog dedicated to FC Barcelona. I told my then boyfriend to shift his proposal to another day so I could focus all my emotional energy on another man. (In my defence, that man was Lionel Messi and he was playing in a World Cup final.)

I also spent those teenage years cramming my brain with as many Taylor Swift lyrics as it would hold. When she came to Singapore for The Eras Tour in 2024, I took a day off work to queue for concert tickets. 

And yet, while I would’ve readily identified as a football fan, I’ve always been reluctant to call myself a Swiftie. The former label bestows a certain degree of cultural cachet upon girls or women – albeit after you prove that you can name at least five players on the team and explain the offside rule – while the latter kinda confirms that you’re just as basic as the rest of your gender. 

That’s the internalised misogyny talking. Being a girl is very in vogue now, but I think part of me is still recovering from an adolescence moulded by an internet that wasn’t always so ready to embrace girlhood. 

In the early 2010s, pop idol fangirls were everyone’s favourite punching bag. Twitter (now X) users of a certain vintage might remember @MandaSwaggie, an infamous Justin Bieber superfan, who was likely made up and designed to be as hateable as possible.

She courted controversy around 2012 by comparing the Canadian singer’s popularity with that of the more culturally esteemed American rocker and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. For that, and many other offences, she was dubbed, courtesy of one Reddit user, “the fall of humanity and disgrace to all Amanda(s)”. 

This – the disparaging of fangirls and the object of their affections – is by no means a new phenomenon. Nowadays, liking The Beatles is a mark of sophisticated music taste, but their fans were once the blueprint for the caricature of the screamy fangirl.  

Writing about the band’s 1964 performance at Carnegie Hall, The Nation magazine described their audience as upper-middle-class young women brought into town “to howl, to let go, scream, bump, twist and clutch themselves ecstatically out there in the floodlights for everyone to see”.

“Later,” it added, “they can all go home and grow up like their mummies, but this was their chance to attempt a very safe and very private kind of rapture.” 

Portrayals like this solidified the link between fandom and feminine excess, says Dr Bertha Chin, a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore who researches transcultural fandoms and celebrity cultures. 

It was especially frowned upon because of the fear that these inconsequential passions might distract women from the roles they were expected to fulfil in society – namely that of wife and mother. 

“Whereas sports is seen as something that’s more generational, something that is passed down from father to son. And because of that familial setting, it’s viewed much more positively.” 

In recent years, however, fangirls have enjoyed a rehabilitation of sorts, with articles and books extolling the social and psychological benefits of communities built around a common interest. Mainstream coverage of the economic impact of music titans like Swift, Beyonce or Lady Gaga has also bolstered the perception of fans as participants in a legitimate cultural phenomenon. 

That is, as long as they keep their emotions in check. One Australian Swift fan learnt the hard way when she uploaded a 30-second TikTok video of herself reacting to a surprise song performed at the singer’s 2024 Sydney concert. 

As the muffled chords of Exile (2020) – “the song that saved (her) life” – drift out of the stadium, she lets out an ear-splitting wail and collapses into the arms of her friend. 

To many, it seemed a ridiculous overreaction, and the internet immediately pounced. “It’s not that deep,” sneered one tweet. “Skin-crawling cringe,” declared a comment on Reddit. 

Contrast that with videos of fans from around the world reacting to the 2022 World Cup final. Much of the same screaming, crying and keeling over is involved and, yet, in this case, all of it makes for “great atmosphere”.

One is hysterical, the other passionate. One a juvenile infatuation that has to be outgrown, the other a lifelong hyperfixation. 

Maybe, in the words of the online fan collective known as Stan Twitter, we all just need to touch grass.

Or perhaps we need to extend to all fans the same indulgence we dole out to 50-year-old relatives who are still hopelessly obsessed with Liverpool. Sometimes, overreacting is part of the fun. In the case of Swifties, at least, exaggerated outbursts at the star’s surprise song choices have become something of a tongue-in-cheek inside joke within the fandom.

Perhaps this sort of thing doesn’t always need to be outgrown. Perhaps community is community, even if it’s confined to a screen and bound together by ultra-niche inside jokes. 

Touch grass once in a while, yes, but don’t stop being a fan. Lose yourself in that album; stay up all night for that match. It’s as deep as you want it to be. 

• Hear Me Out is a new series where young journalists (over)share on topics ranging from navigating friendships to self-loathing, and the occasional intrusive thought.

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