Are Phillies Fans the Most Intoxicated Sports Fans in America?

Have you ever wondered about the number of people who leave major sporting events totally blitzed?  A study that might give us the answer was reported in the January issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. The data collected suggests thousands of fans are leaving stadiums legally drunk, and possibly getting behind the wheel that way. No surprise there, perhaps, but the study got down to cases, giving breath tests to 362 attendees at 13 baseball and 3 football games, and finding that a whopping 40% had been drinking, while about 8% were leaving the stadium over the legal limit. “Eight percent doesn’t sound high, but translate into how many people are leaving the stadium drunk, and you have thousands of people,” said Darin Erickson, lead author of the study. The New Meadowlands stadium, where the New York Giants football team plays, has a capacity of 82,500. If this study holds, about 6,600 people leave drunk after watching a game. Multiply those results by the number of games on any given weekend, and it’s enough to convince us to stay home and watch sports on TV.  Studies proposed for the future could reveal scientifically which sport has the drunkest fans. On an early statistical note, Philadelphia sports fanatics were selected by GQ Magazine as the worst sports fans in America. Phillies fans, described by Bleacher Report as “bottle-throwers, couch-torchers, sexual harassers, projectile vomiters and serially indifferent bandwagon-hoppers,” may have hit bottom last season, “when Citizens Bank Park played host to arguably the most heinous incident in the history of sports: A drunken fan intentionally vomited on an 11-year-old girl."