What "How I Met Your Mother" Teaches Us About Sports Fandom

How Marshall, Robin, Ted, Barney, & Lily map the spectrum of sports fandom

One of my favorite podcasts lately has been How We Made Your Mother, a show hosted by Craig Thomas and Josh Radnor about the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. Thomas is one of the co-creators of the show, while Radnor played Ted Mosby, the protagonist of the show. How I Met Your Mother is a show about growth and relationships at its core, but within that framing it also presents other lessons.

Radnor and Thomas have gone into depth about the application of the storylines and jokes to serious real-life problems and situations. A common thread throughout the series’ nine seasons is the way sports are introduced throughout and how it teaches us about the different types of fandom that exist and the way they color each character’s personality whether they are a diehard fan, casual observer, or not a fan at all.

Marshall Eriksen: The Dedicated Fan

Perhaps the most relatable fan experience among the main cast is that of Marshall Eriksen. Marshall is originally from Minnesota and moved to New York City with Ted after college. Like many transplants in new cities, Marshall clings to his home state and longs for an eventual return. This is evidenced by his multiple visits back to Minnesota throughout the series and a conversation early in the series with his fiancé Lily about eventually moving back to St. Cloud, Minnesota.

One of the ways that Marshall holds on to his Midwestern identity is through his favorite sports teams. This is mostly centered around the Vikings, but he also mentioned a love of the Twins—specifically noting that his favorite player as a kid was pitcher Frank Viola. The Vikings play a central role in Marshall’s persona. He is seen wearing Vikings gear frequently, he bonds over the team’s game with his father (both before and after Marvin Eriksen’s death), and even through furniture purchases with numerous Viking lamps and other knickknacks.

This aspect of Eriksen’s character resonates with me as someone who grew up in New York City as a Knicks fan and despite moving away, that fandom remains and is a reminder of where I come from. Marshall finds himself in a city, firmly planting roots into a place that is the antithesis of where he grew up, and often finds himself missing his home. The love of the Vikings leads him to a Minnesota-themed bar in New York City named the “Walleye Saloon”. This place is a portal to his happy place, where he can connect with other Vikings fans—creating a community rooted in a shared longing for life in Minnesota.

Marshall’s connection to Minnesota and dedication to the Vikings highlight the kind of person that he is: passionate and fiercely loyal. These traits manifest in his relationship and eventual marriage with Lily, a relationship based on relentless belief in destiny and commitment. Marshall is the type of sports fan that attached himself to a team that his father, his hero, passed on to him through various tailgates at Vikings games during his childhood. It’s a lifelong commitment that many fans have to their teams.

Marshall represents the people that stick with a team through thick and thin, through the wins and losses, especially the losses. Because as was evidenced in “Tailgate” in season 7, the Vikings become the backdrop and linking factor of community. In the episode, Marshall starts by grilling some burgers and drinking a beer with a portable TV to watch the Vikings with his dad who recently passed away. This quickly evolves into a gathering moment where Marshall realizes that it was the group dynamic that made his dad’s tailgates so memorable.

The passing down of fandom and the bonding over a shared team is the secret sauce of fandom and why people will often stay committed to their favorite team even when the results on the field do not match the intensity of those in the stands. In that sense, Marshall Eriksen is the archetypal sports fan—the person that gladly inherited the love of a team and will continue to pass it on to his children when the time comes. It’s a tribalism that is beautiful and the fabric of rooting.

Robin Scherbatsky: The Outsider

The sports story of Robin Scherbatsky is centered around a national identity. As the only member of the cast that is Canadian, much of her sports portrayal is tied to her pride for her home country. The official winter sport of Canada is ice hockey, and as a result it is often directly tied to Robin’s character—so much so that her favorite team, the Vancouver Canucks, often are mentioned throughout the show.

A running bit on HIMYM is to make fun of Canada, often at Robin’s expense. Weaved into the jokes are satirical jabs at flamboyant displays of American patriotism, but never lost in them is the fact that Robin is fiercely proud of her Canadian heritage and will defend it fiercely regardless of how many jokes come at her expense.

Her patriotism reminds me of immigrants who move to the US with a fierce passion for soccer and refuse to let any amount of American criticism deter them from their love of the sport and their teams. Robin often mythologizes and glorifies the toughness of hockey players, displays a keen knowledge of hockey teams and players, and uses popular Canadian lexicon and cultural references throughout her lines in the series. The entire Robin Scherbatsky character is really a giant ode to Canada.

Hockey and sports at large play a sizable role in many of Robin’s storylines. She briefly dates a former hockey player turned sportscaster named Curt Irons in the episode “The Platinum Rule”, she also mentions dating a center for the Knicks (my money is on Jerome Jordan or Earl Barron among the 2010-2013 Knicks centers) in “The Bro Mitzvah”, and when she faces the prospect of a year without Lily in Season 9 she bonds with someone over a mutual hatred of the Boston Bruins.

Robin also expresses a knowledge of basketball after she breaks up with Curt Irons. While doing his sports update, and clearly distraught, Curt emotionally asks why the Knicks lost, using his heartbreak as a metaphor for the team’s loss. Robins quickly notes that the team’s perimeter shooting has been off this year. Which, if the timelines are considered accurate, is true since in the season that the episode aired the Knicks shot 34.8% from three, ranked 23rd in the league in that statistic.

All around Robin she encounters people that don’t express any passion for hockey or Canada, and it makes her hold on to those parts of her harder the longer that she is away from her youth north of the border. This attachment speaks to how sports can often link us to places in ways that other things cannot.

With hockey, Robin is not only reminded of a sport that she played and loves to consume, but of her own identity as a Canadian. It is her country’s national sport and she will watch it and defend it as long as she can. Her love of the sport and her country highlight that she is an outsider in this group in so many ways—and that sentiment reflects what it is like to be an immigrant and a transplant. The fact that you may have assimilated but there is a part of you that will always be in that other place.

Robin’s continued connection to hockey shows us that sports have a way of linking us to our past, and often can be the connective tissue with like-minded individuals. In the series, there is a moment before Robin is set to take a US Citizenship test where she struggles with her identity. She feels so detached from Canada but at the same time never fully embraced by the United States. She is in limbo, as so many foreigners in this country often are. Hockey in that sense is her north star, and will always take her back home, and there is a tremendous beauty in that that speaks to the power of sports.

Ted Mosby: The Casual Fan

Ted is the narrator of HIMYM and the main character. The entire series revolves around his never-ending search for “the one”. During his search, Ted finds himself shifting and morphing as a result of the experiences that he endures as a single man looking for love. This sort of malleability is both what makes him a great character but also a maddening one. We see growth from him but we also see a person that often cannot make the right decision even when the evidence is right in front of him.

When it comes to sports, Ted mirrors this tendency. He is at times a clued in sports fan, but at others completely oblivious to the sports world. In the early seasons he expresses a keen interest in baseball, as it is one of the only things he finds himself able to talk to his father about. Ted being from the Cleveland area, these seasons show him rattling off players and their chances to win statistical awards. In this moment he shows that he is at the very least, a consistent baseball watcher.

But in later seasons, he shows a lack of familiarity with sports terms by calling the New York Jets’ uniforms “costumes” and being unfamiliar with the rules of basketball when he joins a men’s league. Several seasons pass before he shows interest in sports again, only to have him locked into a hate-watching session of a Miami Heat game to boo LeBron James after he left Cleveland. He seems to have a passion for the teams he grew up watching, but he suffers from the dilemma of rooting from a distance that anyone that has relocated in their life has experienced.

Especially in the era that the show takes place (2005-2014), watching sports is a very local exercise. Getting out of market games was more challenging then than it is today, which means that even if Ted wanted to watch the Browns over the Giants or Jets, it would have been difficult.

Even within his Cleveland fandom, he contradicts himself. He mentions the Browns “Dawg Pound defense” in one episode while also belittling and mocking his childhood friend Punchy’s rabid Browns allegiance. In Ted’s defense, Browns colors for a wedding? Be better Punchy. A theme that pops up in the series is Ted’s following bandwagon nature that is addressed in the season 8 episode “The Stamp Tramp” where he is criticized for not initiating his own trends.

This tendency is shown in his gravitation to various New York teams throughout the show and in the way that he consumes sports to adapt to life in New York City. His baseball knowledge also comes through when he references multiple Yankees players and seems to have his finger on the pulse of the team’s roster. This on and off tendency is reflective of the way that Ted hops through trends and cements himself as a casual fan.

In recent years through social media discourse, the term “casual” has come to mean an insult. But in reality, the majority of sports fans are Ted Mosby, casually tuning in for the big moments and having large gaps in their knowledge that dedicated fans mock them for. Ted is the type of person that watches the Super Bowl religiously, fills out a March Madness bracket (big board, big luck!), and likes attending live games. He is like the majority of fans that root for his hometown team and not much beyond that.

But it wouldn’t be Ted Mosby without a contradiction. While is most certainly a casual fan in almost every sport, he is a dedicated baseball fan due to the relationship with his father. Only a dedicated Cleveland baseball fan would just rattle off a name like Vinnie Pestano (a relief pitcher for Cleveland in the early 2010s). While many may criticize Ted’s gaps in sports knowledge, we all know many fans like him.

Barney Stinson: Entertainment Value

When you watch an episode of How I Met Your Mother, it’s important to view Barney’s character from a very specific lens—this is a story through the eyes of Ted’s future self, and no person’s antics are more exaggerated than Barney’s. There are a few reasons why this could be, chief among them that as the person that marries Robin, that future Ted had an axe to grind.

But I would argue a counterpoint. Barney’s entire ethos is making his life “legendary”. Being legendary opens up an avenue for an entire existence being defined by tall tales and exaggeration, all in pursuit of the great story. Barney’s character is defined by helping his friends have a night that they will always remember. It is an ethos that dictates his approach to his life and in his dating exploits that are highlighted throughout the show. It also defines his relationship with sports, where the experience and the story are what matters.

Barney doesn’t particularly pay attention to sports as a fan, but rather to keep current with players and terminology as a means to keep up his deceptions to gain short-term companionship. There are a few examples of plays from Barney’s fabled text “The Playbook” that show his use of sports knowledge to help him achieve his goals.

The Olympian is a play that involves impersonating an Olympian when the “Olympics are relevant” and mentioning that you medaled in a certain event. In The Playbook, Barney rattles off various winter and summer Olympic events as examples, showing that he at the very least has a passing knowledge of Olympic sports to be able to sell the bit. He mentions obscure enough sports like kayak sprint, archery, and ski jumping to be just believable enough.

The Jorge Posada is a play that plays to Barney’s direct knowledge of the New York Yankees, where he argues that impersonating a catcher is doable because they are always wearing masks on the field. This shows that Barney is familiar with the rules of baseball, and ironically has a very decent grasp on the lack of recognition that athletes that wear face protection experience. Barney uses the Yankees in future stories, specifically when he pretends to be Alex Rodriguez to pick up a girl at the bar.

Despite Barney’s stated hatred for hockey, he still leverages hockey lore to The Playbook. His play The Stanley Cup requires using a punch bowl and a lamp wrapped in foil to mimic the look of the Stanley Cup, the trophy awarded each year to the NHL champion. This again highlights Barney’s knowledge of hockey, its trophy, and an awareness of the sex appeal of hockey players in the HIMYM universe.

Lastly, The Call Barney Stinson is a play that we see play out when Barney attends the Super Bowl with his phone number on a sign that is shown on the broadcast. This worked well as his burner phone receives countless calls, prompting Barney to call it a “magic” phone. This play requires Barney to both understand what constitutes a massive sporting event (granted the Super Bowl is pretty obvious). But it also requires a knowledge that signs get put on TV and how to act to get noticed by the cameras. At the very least, Barney has watched enough sports on TV to know what works and what doesn’t.

But Barney’s fascination doesn’t end with his pursuit of women. He is also a thrill junkie, who wants to feel alive at all times. This personality trait, unsurprisingly, eventually led to a gambling addiction. While this is most prominently evident in his propensity to play Xing Hai Shi Bu Xing (a fictional Chinese card game which translates to “Deal or No Deal”), he also shows struggles through his exposure to sports gambling.

What started as a little dollar bet with Marshall, eventually devolves into betting thousands of dollars on football games and having a bookie. Anyone that bets on sports will tell you that there is a rush and commitment that comes with betting on games. Barney descending into degenerate gambler status means he is watching a lot of games and betting on what he sees, while also having an intimate understanding of point-spreads, odds, and parlays.

Barney Stinson is the person who values the entertainment aspect of sports. He is the gambler focused on the point-spreads—relishes being right and implodes when wrong. He’s the person who gets into the game at the bar but maybe doesn’t pay attention to the happenings of a league throughout the season. Anyone that is a diehard finds fans like Barney slightly annoying but also incredibly fun to be around. Barney is the type of guy you call when you have last-minute tickets to the Knicks game and need to make sure the night is legendary.

Lily Aldrin: The Uninterested but Supportive Friend

I used to have a roommate that expressed zero interest in sports—often calling it sports ball. She liked certain shows that I wasn’t a fan of, but we indulged one another’s interests as a roommate courtesy. So, when I would be watching the Knicks she would ask a few questions and feign interest. And when she would watch Ru Paul’s Drag Race, I would do her the same courtesy. This dynamic perfectly encapsulates Lily Aldrin’s relationship to sports.

Lily falls into the artsy and creative type, that was never exposed to sports and never fell into it as an adult. In fact, when you consider that Lily’s father Mickey was a failed board game inventor, it is likely that Lily never liked sports because the idea of competitive gameplay reminded her too much of her absent father. Her father also turned into a degenerate horse racing bettor, which would have further alienated her to not like sports.

But fate, as it so often is, plays a bit of a cruel joke on Lily by pairing her with a husband who is a die-hard sports fan. She is along for the ride, showing that a healthy relationship can exist where the partners have interests that don’t overlap. Marshall often buys ridiculous Vikings memorabilia and goes to the Walleye Saloon to watch Vikings game without being made to feel bad about it by his partner.

Lily’s acceptance doesn’t stop with her husband. She partakes in the Super Bowl watching tradition even though she’s only in it for the wings and the commercials. She appreciates Robin’s love for hockey even if she doesn’t follow the sport. She has cursory knowledge that shows this support, by knowing that Robin likes the Canucks and when she calls Mike Tyson the greatest boxer of all time. She is someone that is adjacent to sports but never begrudges her friends for having that interest.

In the season 4 episode “Murtaugh”, Lily’s lack of sports background is on full display. She enlists Marshall to be the basketball coach for her kindergarten class. Marshall, as someone that was brought up on a somewhat toxic masculinity approach to sports by his father, takes it very seriously and turns into a slightly less violent version of Bobby Knight. Lily, on the other hand, encouraged a lack of structure focused on fun. Lily saw Marshall’s approach, one that is still present in coaching today, as barbaric and that is indicative of the way she feels about sports.

The dynamic of one partner loving sports and the other not caring about it is not a new phenomenon. Quite the contrary, it is incredibly common in American relationships. Admirably, Lily never lets her disinterest in sports harm her relationships, which is to be commended. That sort of balancing act is not easy to accomplish, and Lily provides a blueprint to successfully navigate interests that don’t align in a friend group.

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The How I Met Your Mother cast presents us with a layered look at sports fandom. There are a couple of dedicated sports fans (Marshall and Robin), two that drift in and out of interest (Ted and Barney), and one who is completely uninterested in sports (Lily). And yet they do not let these differences get in the way of them having a good time when it comes to enjoying sports.

Lily partakes in the Super Bowl watch gatherings and happily attends Robots vs Wrestlers, which is pretty close to a sporting event. Marshall and Robin bond over their missed homes while watching sports the other is unfamiliar with. Sports is present throughout the nine seasons of the series, and it connects the cast at times, which showcases the true power of fandom and appeal of sports regardless of how invested in it you are.

In the show we see how sports connect us to where we’re from, is the foundation of a difficult relationship with a parent and can create lifelong traditions that strengthens the bonds of friends that become family. How I Met Your Mother is a sitcom about a man’s winding and meandering journey for love. But within it, there is a story to be told about the way that sports can be a foundational fabric in the relationships that we cherish. And there’s something beautiful about that sentiment, as anyone that has bonded with another person over sports can attest to.