Seasonal Stanley Cup Playoffs post: Culture change, and… when did everyone start wearing merch to the games, anyway?

As an archaeologist, I am interested in culture change, and that includes changes in conventions, expectations and practices. Sometimes, these can happen over amazingly short time-spans (archaeologically speaking).

One change that I’ve noticed over the past few decades, which is a short time for an archaeologist, is that especially at playoff games, almost the entirety of the audience wears a team jersey, or at least some form of team branded merchandise. It wasn’t always like that. That’s culture change, and it’s interesting to me.

I’m interested in why, of course, but today I’ll just focus on establishing that there has indeed been a change, and trying to learn a bit about its chronology. There’s a lot more to do on this, and in much greater detail, but at least this is a bit of a start, and hopefully it can continue at some point (if anyone wants to do a master’s degree counting team jerseys in pictures of hockey game audiences, email me).

1980 vs 2022, or before and after

Figure 1: The crowd at the Flames-Stars game Sunday May 15th 2022. Source: My phone camera taking a picture of the broadcast on CBC.

This is what game 7 of the series between the Calgary Flames and the Dallas Stars looked like on my television last Sunday (Figure 1). All that red in the audience is not a coincidence. Those are all Calgary Flames team jerseys.

Figure 2: The 1980 final. Very little team merch. Two definite and one suspected instances circled in yellow. Source: image.jpg (960×636) (newsday.com)

By contrast, here is a picture (Figure 2) of the audience in the 1980 Stanley Cup Finals-deciding game 6 between the New York Islanders and the Philadelphia Flyers. The game was played in New York at Nassau Coliseum. I have circled two definite and one possible Islanders shirts, and two of the caps may be team merch as well, but it is inconclusive. A couple of guys are wearing unbranded, blank hockey jerseys as well. One of them is wearing one of the suspected team-related caps.

What happened between 1980 and 2022? To find out, I looked at pictures of crowds in the finals (deciding game when possible).

A bit of social context

Before I look at the data though, I have to note something about wearing commercially branded clothing in general. While it is now almost ubiquitous, it used to be quite rare until recently, and even socially unacceptable.

At least some people my age will share my experience of wearing a commercially branded item for the first time. In my case, it was actually in the early 80s, so it matches up with the time frame we are looking at here. I got home with a Ford Motor branded baseball cap, a few of which my friend had received as a gift and handed around. My father looked at me with a disapproving expression and asked me how much I was getting paid to wear it.

I have heard others tell similar stories, and some may therefore think it is apocryphal and just floating around, but I can confirm that it actually happened to me and not just to someone else I heard about. I decided I would still wear it when I played ball at the park. So in a sense, I have a dim personal awareness that the branded clothing barrier in general was broken by rebellious kids in the early 80s.

Timing the change

Looking at the crowds at finals games (that’s the kind of mind-numbing work archaeologists do, to paraphrase Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes), there is really nothing to report until 1990.

Figure 3: 1990 final. Note the Boston Bruins overshirts in the crowd. Source: The Cup is Coming Home To Edmonton – The Copper & Blue (coppernblue.com)

This picture (Figure 3) of the 1990 deciding game between the Boston Bruins and the Edmonton Oilers shows that a majority of the crowd are wearing what looks like a Bruins shirt made of that very flimsy material you can wear over your street clothes.

I wonder if it was some kind of promotion, with shirts handed out to the audience at the entrance to the game. If any of my more experienced (not to say older) Boston-based readers have the inside scoop, I would be grateful to hear the story. In any case, while this is an example of a mostly merch clad audience, it doesn’t seem launch a trend or to stick right away. In the 1991 series between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Minnesota North Stars, the crowd is back to it’s pre-merch normalcy.

Figure 4: 1992 final. More merch, and more team colour matches in the crowd. Source: 466895208.jpeg (3200×2215) (penslabyrinth.com)

By the 1992 final in Pittsburgh (Figure 4), I am seeing a few more items of official team merch, but also what I intuitively see as a higher than expected frequency of Penguin yellow in the stands if no one is wearing it intentionally. I haven’t counted, but as one of my old profs used to say, I used the “look and you will see” statistical method to get preliminary results.

Figure 5: 1995 Final. Devils in the stands. Source: New Jersey Devils Celebrate 1995 Stanley Cup 20 Years Later (thehockeywriters.com)

By 1995 (Figure 5), the trend of wearing team merch is getting well established. This new option exists notably because of a change in the cultural landscape: collared shirts, jackets, ties, and blouses, which still dominate the 1980 crowd, are no longer expected or worn as everyday outfits. Note that in the 1990 picture that features the flimsy Bruins shirts, many in the crowd are wearing them over their regular clothes, even over their shirts and ties.

And now, of course, the team jersey is de rigueur at play-off games, and is even becoming dominant at regular season games, so that anyone who doesn’t wear one could feel slightly out of place. Frequency dependent copying can explain how trends become fixed once a good portion of the crowd follows them, but the initial establishment of such an expensive trend (to the wearer) is interesting in itself, given the obstacles. If anyone has thoughts on how the trend originated in the first place, I’m happy to chat.