Sports are one of the things that people across the world take pleasure in and bond over. Sports can be wonderful, beautiful things. They can also be incredibly toxic.

Sports fans can generally be seen as loud and annoying and obnoxious about their team. This is a fair observation, and it’s perfectly fine and usually harmless to be outspoken about your support for your team. However, when your team wins the Super Bowl and you start to riot and overturn cars in the street, then it becomes a problem. It’s one thing to be decked out in your team’s colors. It’s one thing to shout and celebrate in the street when your team is victorious. But property damage is crossing the line into the reckless kind of behavior that needs to stop.

People take their sports teams way too seriously.

They need to take a step back and realize there are more important things in the world. People get into this weird state of mind where they put on the fan goggles and all rational thought goes out the window.

Online platforms like Twitter make it even worse. People can be downright nasty to other people for the sake of "the sport." People will curse out other people and send them hate and even threats just because their opinions are different, they support another team, or they don’t like their team.

Being a fan of a team gives you no right to act this way towards other people.

I myself am guilty of thoughts like this. I’m an intense sports fan, and my irrational hatred of a team named after flightless Antarctic birds can blur my thoughts. I’ve had very nasty thoughts towards certain teams and often other fans.

In my memory, I have only yelled at a fan of another team once. I have many times purposefully avoided, unfollowed, or stopped talking to a person because they support a team that I don’t and I don’t want to get into a fight. It’s petty, I know. And I also know that I need to be better about controlling my thoughts and feelings.

At the end of the day, it’s just a game.

This isn’t even getting into all of the truly nasty stuff that sports fans do and say to one another. Toxic masculinity, sexism, and racism are rampant in sports. Whether that be a man telling you “you only like it because the players are hot,” or fans making fun of a player for being “weak” or “like a girl,” or the endless racist incidents that seem to run rampant in sports, there is a lot wrong with the culture and fandom surrounding sports.

Sport in its purest form is a great display of athleticism that can be fun and rewarding to watch, but hinging your entire being upon it and using it as an excuse to be a gross, terrible person is something that needs to be gone from sports and sports culture.