How to Talk About Sports at Work … When You’re Not a Sports Fan
This post may contain affiliate links and Corporette® may earn commissions for purchases made through links in this post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
I've never been much for sports, but Elizabeth has — and she's generously offered to suggest tips on how to talk about sports at work! Big thanks to Elizabeth! – Kat
A reader recently asked for tips about how to become “conversational” enough about sports to be able to follow along when her colleagues' chitchat headed in that direction. With the caveat that no one has to learn about sports if they're not interested, I have been designated as a Sports Friend by many folks who have found themselves in similar situations and am happy to assist.
Without totally messing up my semi-anonymity, I will say that I earned my credentials by playing a lot of sports as a kid and teenager, being driven to those sports by a dad who listened to sports talk radio, and attending undergrad and law school at a Big Sports School. After decades of playing, coaching, refereeing, and watching sports, I promise you that I’ve put in my 10,000 hours and then some.
With my bona fides firmly established, I offer the following suggestions.
How to Talk About Sports
Don't fake it
If you truly don't care about sports, it's totally fine to opt out. Personally, I cannot get myself to care about basketball. If that's where the conversation goes, I'm probably not going to be too involved, and that’s fine. If you put in a few hours of trying to watch something and you just can’t get into it, it’s okay to let it go.
don't go overboard
If your colleagues go nuts for college football, or you have a client who's really into a certain WNBA team, that's where we're going to focus. No one has time to be an expert on all the sports.
Learn a little bit about the basics of the game
This will take a little work, but it's fun! There are a few options for this. I would probably start by taking myself over to YouTube for some explainer videos. For example, the professional sports leagues have strong social media presences and an incentive to get more people hooked. The NHL has Hockey 101 with Snoop Dogg, the MLB has Intro to Baseball, and the NFL made this fun little video for non-American viewers.
Another great option is to find a patient friend who really loves a sport and treat them to tickets to a game. I promise you, they would love nothing more than to sit and talk your ear off for a few hours about how the game works and why that team is so special, in exchange for a few beers.
(I have been this friend. It's glorious.)
If you don't feel comfortable with that, turn on a game and fire up ChatGPT. I just typed in “Explain the rules of baseball to someone who doesn't like sports,” and the response was pretty great.
{related: using AI chatbots to plan a vacation}
When you feel like you have a handle on the basics, just watch a few games and let yourself enjoy them! I promise, there is nothing complicated happening here, and you can absolutely understand the general idea after a few hours.
(The only exception to this is cricket. I am so sorry to the cricket fans — it is just completely over my head!)
Pick an entry point that feels authentic
You're probably never going to be someone who has an encyclopedic knowledge of sports statistics. That's okay! Most people are pretty casual sports observers, anyway. We're here for the spectacle! With a basic understanding of a sport, you can keep an eye out for the big stories — take a quick glance at ESPN.com or read the headlines in the sports section of your local paper to keep up on local teams. You'll start to recognize names and faces after a little bit.
If your local team is doing well, follow along! The electricity of a hometown team heading toward a championship is so much fun.
Check Out The Athletic — OR try A PODCAST
If you want to take a broader view, I recommend using your New York Times subscription to get access to The Athletic. They do a great job of writing about sports in a way that doesn't just report on who won last night's game, but also talks about some of the bigger cultural impacts. For me, I'm not going to feel comfortable having a detailed conversation about various NFL draft prospects, but if I'm sitting at a table with a bunch of folks talking about the draft, I'm absolutely going to bring up this NYT great article about the suits the players wear.
There are also a lot (A LOT) of sports podcasts available if you really want to drill down into something specific. Some of them can veer into a pretty toxic area if you’re not careful, so be judicious, but if you’re really dying to learn more about the Buffalo Bills or Everton FC, there’s a very good chance that there are hours and hours of podcasts available for you to peruse at your leisure.
{related: how to deal with political talk at the office}
Jump right in!
If you're involved in an office culture where sports are a big deal, don’t feel like you have to be an expert to get involved. If your firm has box seats, they're not just for superfans! If you have an office-wide fantasy league, join in!
Yes, there are always going to be some dads, Brads, and Chads who are going to try to exclude you from the conversation regardless of what you're bringing to the table. I trust you can identify those folks and steer clear of them. For the rest of us, we love to see people making an effort, and we'd love to take 10 minutes to explain how to draft a fantasy football team and then take credit when you inevitably win the whole thing.
when you FEel lost
If you find yourself in a conversation where you're out of your depth, just say so! No one is going to be mad at you for not having a favorite member of the 1986 New York Mets. You'll avoid sticking your foot in your mouth and you'll give the other person a chance to show how much they know. If you're trying to connect with people, you often get further by letting them talk about their favorite things, anyway.
I'm a believer in the big tent approach to sports fandom. There's room for casual observers and die-hards! Welcome!
Readers, do tell! Are you seriously into sports (tell us which ones!), just a casual fan, or someone who favors the term “sportsball”? Do your coworkers talk about sports a lot? Do you ever feel left out if you don't know anything about it?
Psst: If you're a soon-to-be summer associate or summer intern worried about some “fun” summer associate events like golfing, baseball, sailing, an office pool party, or something else where you don't know what to wear? Check our previous discussions.
Stock photo via Stencil.
Or maybe we stop feeding the brand of bro that forces every convo to be about sports? I love that influencer that uses makeup analogies to showcase just how obnoxious sports analogies get in a business setting. “Hey, hey now. I feel like you’re putting setting spray on while we’re still adding foundation over primer here.”
I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it would be best to snuff out bro culture in the workplace. On the other hand, the bros will talk about the sportsball no matter what, so perhaps it’s better for women to participate in those conversations instead of being denied access.
Fortunately no one in my remote workplace talks about the sportsball and I only encounter the sportsball talk socially, where it’s about 75% men and 25% women participating. I just ignore it and then rejoin the conversation when they move on to talking about music.
I do think the conversation is shifting more as there are more interests in cities now. Foodie/restaurant chat is more popular in my workplace now.
Meh, sports are a global thing, and, shocker, women like sports too! If you don’t like it, you can just say “I don’t follow sports, sorry!”
Women like sports too and use sports analogies. It is fine that you don’t like sports but you are feeding into an incredibly gendered stereotype by assuming that this is a topic for men. It is a topic for people who want to talk about something relatively noncontroversial to interact with other people and build connections over common interests.
It is fine to say: “I do not really follow sports”. Most people understand and appreciate that, but the “I am too good to follow something so frivolous” attitude is incredibly off-putting.
It’s actually traditionally a way to keep many women out of the conversation. You can pretend all things are equal. But they aren’t. Yes, many women love sports. But it’s not a stereotype when it’s historically been true. Don’t gaslight the lived experience of so many who were kept out of work golf outings and the like. The Chads and Brads aren’t steering the conversation that way as innocently as simple interest all the time.
No one I work with talks about sports beyond the BIG things like world Juniors, Stanley Cup etc which I do actually pay attention to because it’s like a whole city event.
World Juniors? That’s one BIG thing I’ve never heard of and I follow all my regional major sports teams – and we talk about hockey the least.
Sports are very regional. Even within my huge city with multiple baseball times.
I looooove world juniors, but outside of my kids’ hockey club and my husband’s beer league friends, no one talks about those near me (DC). Are you in Canada? Boston? Upper Midwest?
Boring people who are bad conversationalists use sportsball to mindlessly fill space so they don’t have to actually engage with people they don’t know. Sportsball isn’t the only topic that’s subject to conversational laziness, people do the same with their vacations, kids, school pedigree, it’s a long list. If you find yourself on the receiving end of a lazy word vomit by a person who is important to your position, then your job is to provide enough feedback to make the speaker feel like they’re doing a good job and aren’t as awkward as they are. That means eye contact, feigned interest, and occasional on-topic comments or questions to keep them going until you can make a polite exit.
Have some canned questions/comments you can interject as appropriate. Have you been to that stadium, how is it? That travel schedule must be hard for the players! Sportsball is admittedly where I struggle the most, I’ll be interested if others have canned questions!
I just say…. ” I haven’t been following…. are we good this year? Have you been to any games? Any new players that are exciting? What are the big controversies right now?” Or even just ask them why they enjoy watching that sport so much. Did they used to play? Do their kids?
I love classical music, theater, opera, modern dance, quirky small clubs with live music and live story telling, but everything I enjoy is literally dying. Losing funding. Increasingly crushed by our obsession with hiding in our homes and staring at screens.
But you know….. a lot of people really love sports. Millions of people. It brings them together, makes them happy and helps them forget their troubles for a few hours, quickly forms social bonds between people that may come from very different backgrounds, and brings a lot of money to the cities where games are held. So it is really helpful to have some basic interest and ability to communicate about them, especially as a woman in male dominated fields.
No one is more exasperating or eyeroll-inducing than someone who says “sportsball” unironically.
DH thinks sportsball is dumb (much to my disappointment). He flat tells people he doesn’t follow sports. And then either tries to stear the conversation to something else or waits it out.
I know all the rules of and enjoy watching all levels of ice hockey and baseball, and I understand and appreciate football but don’t seek it out except high school games. I am generally conversant in how the hometown team is doing in all of those, although it’s not a conversation I’d start EXCEPT during the World Series or Stanley Cup playoffs. I don’t care for basketball or soccer but will watch them socially (and ask questions about the soccer rules) and would never turn down tickets to any sportsball game. I make a March Madness bracket and join fantasy sports leagues if the office does those things. I pick all my teams based on vibes and other non-scientific measure because I have zero interest in sports trivia, stats, etc, but am mildly impressed when people fill their heads with that.
I don’t see sports as an inherently bro topic, it’s just an interest that people share or don’t, same as TV, movies, news, books, etc.
I’ve worked with lots of Big Law partners who would talk about sports in the 2 minutes before the conference call with the client or whatever… I always sat there twiddling my thumbs looking like a bump on a log.
Two podcasts I would recommend are Sports Gossip and Casuals. Sports gossip is Charlotte wilder, who has been with USA Today and the bleacher report in past actually writing about sports and Madeline Hill, who is not a sports expert but loves the drama and has a substack, impersonal foul. They chat about the story lines surrounding teams/games each week. They were talking about Jordon Hudson in October before everyone else and did a “what to do/say at your SB party”. It’s very fun. And casuals is by Katie Nolan and she has a guest sometimes or talks with her producing crew and the whole premise is you do t need to be an expert to
Talk about sports. She’s very funny too and really likes sports but also makes it interesting. There are many many more but these are so fun- highly recommend!
I think this article is great! I am a huge sports fan – I’ll watch women’s & men’s college basketball, WNBA, Premier League soccer, F1, tennis, NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA. I will sometimes talk about a big game for my alma mater or city (March Madness, playoffs), but otherwise I don’t tend to bring up sports in the office. Even though I love sports, there’s way too much going on in life to follow all of them all the time so I would never think less of someone for not knowing about a particular game or how a certain team is doing.
If anyone is interested in learning more about sports – and particularly women’s sports – I highly recommend The Gist (https://www.thegistsports.com). They have “intro” articles and discuss sports from a female perspective and without judgment.
I work for a university in a power 5 conference so most people have some awareness of how the college football and basketball teams are doing. I’m a casual fan of these sports but it wouldn’t be hard to follow the teams even if I wasn’t. The conversation usually isn’t that deep and is mainly like “wow we suck this year” or “we’re doing well this year.” Our college town does not have pro sports. The nearest big city has NFL, NBA and WNBA teams but most people don’t really care about them unless something big is happening like making the play-offs. The nearest NHL, MLS and MLB teams are several hours away, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone at work talk about those sports outside of the Olympics or World Cup or something similarly important. In general, unless the college football or basketball teams are spectacularly sucking or doing incredibly well people seem way more into discussing restaurants, travel, kid stuff and current events than sports, which is fine by me. Some people are into a particular sport and like sharing it with others, which is fun – I’m really into the Winter Olympics, especially figure skating – but it’s not expected that you have any specific sports knowledge beyond general awareness of how things are going for the college football/bball teams.
Before joining the university, I worked at a law firm in this town where the old white male partners discussed Friday night high school football scores in detail for HOURS on Monday mornings. Mind you, they did not have kids in the high school or even in K-12 school at all. They were like 60+. They just super passionate about high school football and it was very isolating to not have any knowledge or interest in it. It was super weird and one of a zillion reasons why I didn’t vibe with that firm. I have since gone to a few high school football games (to see my kids or friends’ kids play or perform at halftime) and I think of that law firm every time. I still can’t imagine caring about high school football without a personal connection to the school.