This is going to be basically a retelling from my side, but I don't really want to link it because I want to keep thing separate.
Due to the Eagles making it to the Super Bowl, the football thread in another forum I regularly visit started to re-litigate the whole "Philadelphia has the worst sports fans" discussion. My position on that matter is that yeah, Philly fans have done some bad shit, but you can find equally stupid and equal as much stupid shit for any other city that has a major franchise in every sports league and it is just brought up for Philadelphia because it's a stereotype and websites love easy clicks.
I link an article in the Washington Post from a couple of years ago which analyzed arrests related to football games which showed an overall rise, but not that much difference between fanbases, particularly when correlated to size of fanbase, and definitely not showing Philadelphia as the worst. The article also has quite a lot of rather bad horror stories of extreme violence, weirdly none of them from Philadelphia.
So a guy from New York obviously can't let that stand and argues vehemently that Philly has the worst sports fans, but offering nothing but arguments from personal experience and bullshit hearsay. The best is his argument that "Philly fans rioted when they won! Not even Cubs fans did that!" only linking to some forum thread where a photographer who was in the celebration described it as a riot, pretty obviously because he couldn't find a legitimate news source using the loaded word "riot". His second point was also later disproven when someone else linked to
an article describing 14 arrests when Cubs fans took to the street to celebrate their WS victory.
Anyway, the discussion moves on to events of last Sunday, showing images of drunk Philly fans and the argument being "this didn't happen in Boston!" never mind the fact that Gillette Stadium is 45 km from Boston while the Linc is within city limits located close to Broad Street, that the Boston game was during the day and the Philly game at night, and that there would be a different emotional profile between fans of a team that made the Super Bowl first time in 12 years vs. fans of a team that made it 8 times in 16 years.
Angrily he then says "why don't we run a tally then and count incidents!" and I tell hem "yeah, why don't you!" Instead of doing this he links to
a post from Caps fan site Russian Machine Never Breaks about the infamous Bracelet incident with the words "Gonna be hard to find one this bad from another city". Besides being a biased source (seriously, their evidence for "beers were thrown" is a tweet), mind you that we had already discussed brawls in parking lots as well as stabbing incidents at this point. I simply link to the infamous 10-cent beer night as well as actual riots in Vancouver and Montreal.
His final argument revolves around
a Wikipedia article about listing violent spectator incidents in sports. He proclaims "see, Philadelphia 5 incidents, New York 3 incidents!" Not only is it Wikipedia and thus far from definitive (seriously, the guy even threatened to edit it himself), but it is also rather specific only counting events between fans and people participating in the event (athletes, refs, coaches, etc) and only during the game. No parking lot brawsl, riots, etc. He also lied about the tallies. He added one to Philadelphia because of the incident where Don Saleski went into the stands to beat up a spectator, even though this was in Vancouver and it started because the spectator pulled his hair. He also lied about New York where I also counted four incidents. He dismissed a boxing match in Maddison Square Garden because he couldn't explicitly attribute it to a New York team, ever mind that it was still in New York.
At this point he was also trying pretty hard to move the goalposts from "Philadelphia is the worst" to "Philadelphia is worse than New York". I tell him as much and he says "No, Philly is still the worst of the worst". And then I show him that there are 7 incidents in that Wikipedia article where a fan from Chicago was declared liable for the event. Also another forum member from Australia pointed out that Melbourne shows up 17 times on that list.
