State Of The Fan

We still care, but it takes more to fire us up

You still love sports, but our annual fan survey finds you feeling more distanced from the action than ever. One company has a plan to bring you back. Will you take the bait?

A drum bangs, a matador strides onto the arena floor, the night sky flutters white as 23,000 screaming fans wave kerchiefs. Suddenly, a high-pitched grinding noise pierces the roar at the Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas in Madrid.

Bulls have been gored here almost every Sunday since 1931, but when the matador drops his cape on this fall evening, a different kind of beast charges through the tunnel. Travis Pastrana speeds out on his Suzuki and heads for the 3,400 tons of metal ramps and sand that have dressed up Spain's most iconic bullfighting arena for a freestyle motocross event known as X-Fighters. The American superstar is ready to redefine la corrida for a few gasping minutes as a fight of man against gravity instead of toreador vs. bull.

Then, that noise again. It's not Pastrana's bike; that's down below. This sound is ricocheting up above you, colliding with the blaring techno and the bellowing emcee. You force your eyes up, away from the spotlights sweeping the arena floor, toward the grandstand. And you see them. One cheering fan, then another and another, revving up and holding aloft …

Freaking chain saws.

Pastrana launches into the air and, while flying, stretches back and puts his arms behind his head. Just as it registers that you might have seen this maneuver (the La-Z-Boy) before, you realize that he is also somersaulting backward. And he's raising his hands as he lands. Nobody here has seen that before. You're not sure you just did.

"¡Es La-Z flip!" the emcee yells. "¡Sin manos! ¡La primera vez en España!" The saws howl in appreciation. At that instant, you wonder who's crazier, those maniacs with the power tools or Pastrana. Or you, laughing at the spectacle. Then again, who cares? This is a rave, this is a first kiss, this is election night when your guy wins, a moment when barriers fall and you're one with the crowd and the athlete. As a fan experience, it's a little different from, say, a late-August Pirates vs. Brewers game. And it's all brought to you by Red Bull.

FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS, The Magazine has conducted a national survey to see what's on fans' minds, asking everything from which event you would pay the most to see to what the most common location for having sex at a game is. (This year we polled 1,401 fans; the answers, by the way, are the Super Bowl and the parking lot.) And it's clearer than ever that fans feel whipsawed by two sets of market forces. Ticket and concession prices keep climbing; the No. 1 reason fans cite for staying away from games is that "tickets are too expensive." The cost of arena food clocks in at No. 3 and parking prices rank No. 4. Meanwhile, player salaries and contract demands and egos and entourages keep growing too, further detaching fans from meaningful connections to the athletes whose on-field exploits they admire. In general, fans describe themselves as less avid than they did a year ago, with 40% going to fewer games than they did five years ago.

How does Red Bull fit in? The energy drink company thinks it can be the antidote to this anomie. Red Bull believes it can cure your fan blues, not by removing the corporate element from sports but by putting its cash to work differently—turning entire sports into advertising.

The Red Bull legend: Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz sees locals in Thailand gulping bottles of Krating Daeng, or Red Water Buffalo, licenses said beverage, returns home, tinkers with its formula and launches it in Europe as Red Bull in 1987. With little money to spend on advertising, he turns local athletes—mountain bikers, climbers, snowboarders—into human billboards and strikes gold. He comes to America in 1997 and strikes more gold—and sells 3.1 billion cans worldwide in 2006.

Today, Red Bull is also one of the planet's biggest sponsors of sporting events. It stages action sports events and air races, owns two Formula One teams plus Austrian hockey and soccer clubs, and supports more than 500 athletes by, among other things, paying for them to train at a facility it owns outside Salzburg. Now the company is eyeing U.S. sports. It recently bought and renamed the New York MLS franchise (now the Red Bulls) and is launching a NASCAR team in 2007.

"We are not team owners looking for profits," says Mateschitz, now 62 and a dashing billionaire with silver hair and a tan. The Red Bull founder runs his empire out of a steel and black-marble, volcano-shape headquarters in Fuschl, Austria, his glass-walled office suspended from the roof. "For us," he says, "this is a marketing tool." In fact, Red Bull treats its motorsports and soccer expenses as part of the whopping $1.2 billion it will spend on marketing this year—investments in landing new customers as opposed to subsidiaries that are supposed to turn profits on their own.

To do this, the company hawks more than a liquid. Red Bull's slogan—"It gives you wings"—resonates with Americans as much as its slender and shiny 8.3-ounce caffeinefilled cans. "It's about endless freedom," Mateschitz says. "It says this product enables you to do whatever you want, without mentioning specifically what that is." It's "energy" Red Bull is selling. And members of Generation Y—with contradictory needs to be totally individualistic and to be thought of as cool by others—are buying.

To work this trick, Red Bull pumps its cash through fundamentally different channels than Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Pfizer, Reebok and just about any of the other giant companies whose dollars form the athletic-industrial complex that rules sports today. These corporations go to TV networks and say, "We will give you boatloads of money for commercial time on your programs. You can send some of that money to leagues and teams to secure the broadcasting rights. And they can use it, if they like, to pay players. In return, we want a say in everything from starting times to playoff formats to which celebrities get interviewed during games." Essentially, major sports have become middlemen for TV and its advertisers.

Of course, someone is left out of this equation: the fans. Nearly 60% of those we surveyed think "the commercialization of sports has gone too far." And only a small minority believe that athletes compete for "the fun of playing." Not surprisingly, disaffected fans find ways to cope. Fantasy offers one answer to this powerlessness, and 29% of those who participate say it makes their lives better. Fans are also using home technologies to enjoy sports instead of emptying their wallets at stadiums and arenas. Avid fans now spend an average of 12.1 hours a week following sports, up from 10.9 hours last year, fueled by the latest gadgets: 28% own TiVo or DVR systems and 50% record games for future viewing. Also, 56% of all fans would rather get a large-screen TV plus a digital or satellite sports package than four season tickets to their favorite team's games, and 41% would flat out rather watch games at home than at stadiums or arenas.

Red Bull wants to plug fans back in to the thrill of live competition. To do it, the company stages buzzworthy events at spectacular venues. (In addition to Las Ventas, Red Bull has put on events in Golden Gate Park and wants to hold an X-Fighters at Fenway.) It crams them with entertainment. It records them live to tape or webcasts them rather than producing them exclusively for TV. Sometimes it even lets fans judge the contests.

An air race that Red Bull sponsored in Istanbul in July drew more than 1.5 million fans, the most ever for a sports event. In April, the company added a twist to Fuel and Fury, a freestyle snowmobile contest in Alaska: It paired riders with videographers, told them to capture the best backcountry
images they could, then posted the results online and let fans vote. In 2005, Red Bull brought a MotoGP race to Monterey, Calif., the first in the U.S. in more than 10 years, basically so that American fans could watch Kentucky native Nicky Hayden, his sport's greatest star, in person.

In addition to creating its own events, Red Bull is trying to change the culture of the more-established sports it's entered. At Formula One races, for example, the company distributes the cheeky Red Bulletin, which it bills as "an almost independent newspaper," and sponsors fan pavilions filled with Red Bull, music and pretty girls. "It was a closed club," says Mateschitz. "The Mercedes tent was open only to Mercedes guests, and it was the same with BMW and Ferrari. But motorsports is not made for the auto companies."

We won't know for a while whether a shot of Red Bull will make pro soccer more appealing to Americans or restore a populist touch to NASCAR. But when the New York Red Bulls debuted in April, a freestyle motocross team dazzled fans before the game, and Shakira and Wyclef Jean performed at halftime. In August, Red Bull brought in FC Barcelona for an exhibition game, and 80,000 people showed up.

If there is any dissonance for fans in the fact that Red Bull is just another company trying to take their money, it hasn't registered. That's probably because Mateschitz knows how to amp up a crowd: Mash high-energy athletic feats, great locations and music, and, oh yeah, mindtweaking beverages, into a stunning mix. "It all goes together, doesn't it?" he says. "In the audience, you want to be involved."

Which brings us back to those chain saws. There's no denying that a significant minority of fans are responding to the changes in sports by getting pissed off. While most fans still say they feel "happiness" because of sports, 41% report "anger." Maybe you've heckled a ref or an ump, as 42% of fans say they have, or yelled at someone you love because of sports (34%). But have you hit someone out of anger or frustration because of sports or sent hate mail to an athlete? Well, 12% of fans cop to the former and 6% to the latter—scary numbers no matter how you cut them.

While lethal power tools at a Pistons or Cubs or Raiders or Flyers game is a terrifying proposition, it seems appropriate at X-Fighters—the ultimate noisemaker for fans who want to express themselves at maximum volume. However successful Red Bull ultimately is at entering mainstream American sports, it's already reminded the sports world of an important lesson: Fans aren't stupid. They will seek out the experiences that give them the biggest return for the time, money and emotion they invest. Red Bull events are made for the fans who show up, not for TV, and not for advertisers. As Mateschitz likes to say, "We are our own sponsors." With nothing between the crowd and the athletes, audience participation is no fantasy, and angry fans are rare. The big leagues do a great job of producing revenue, but fans and Red Bull alike are telling them it's time to focus on generating passion, too.

After Pastrana comes to earth, completing what turns out to be the winning run at X-Fighters, he circles the arena, zooms up a dirt landing and leaps off his bike, leaving it to soar, riderless, into the night. He runs to the top of the mound, then, on knees crippled by 19 surgeries, does a standing flip and tumbles down the dirt ramp.

"With that crowd," Pastrana says later, "I don't feel any pain."

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