Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
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Kind: captions Language: en it’s kind of just a fun thing that you can do in this moment when we’re all kind of desperate for fun things and I mean hey everyone I’m here with Michael waters one of our staff writers welcome Michael hi so we’re I’m excited about a story Michael found this week is about cardboard cutout fans and in a moment we’re like lots of people are returning to business as normal sports leagues are finally starting to announce plans and starting to play games again but mostly in empty stadiums and Michael’s got an interesting story about how they’re going to cope with the loss of ticket revenue and also try to sort of add some color to the stadium’s on TV that they show their game son tell us a little about how you found the story Michael yeah so I think like a lot of people I came across a few anecdotal cases of different sports teams in Germany in South Korea putting up cardboard fans in order to fill the stadiums and like my immediate question was who are the people who are actually supplying these cardboard fans and why and who’s buying them and that leads me down a very long journey through the world of cardboard fans and I’m not sure if everyone’s familiar but the way the model of this works is basically that a fan of a sports team will buy will take a photo of themselves and then submit it to the team and where the team does is they’ll partner with a startup company to print out your photo on cardboard and then put you up in the stands and it’s like a photo from your torso up so you have these very funny-looking cardboard cutouts of people like smiling or cheering just kind of like frozen in different stadium seats throughout the world and what I realized as I started reporting this is that I kind of expected this to be like a one-off novelty I assume that just a few sports stadiums would actually be doing this but it’s actually spreading throughout much of the world lots of major teams and a lot of small teams in particular are getting in on this and there they’re about like four or five different companies throughout the world especially in the UK that are basically the brains behind creating cardboard fans and they’re partnering with different especially like smaller teams to print the fans to create like an online portal and people are buying them and they’re so far most of the like most of the cardboard fans that exists are based outside of the US especially in England’s premier league they have a number of teams there that are doing cardboard fans but so far there’s one soccer team in Auckland called the Oakland roots that is in the process of rolling out their cardboard fans system and they’re partnering with a UK company to do that and the way that they’re approaching this for instance is partly to recoup revenue but it’s also a way to sort of showcase their community of fans in this moment when everyone is a part and so they’re a pretty small team they have a stadium of like five or six thousand people that usually sold out pre-pandemic and their aim right now and they just launched this project last week is to start filling up their preseason and their regular season games with that fan community from Auckland that kind of made them possible the first place and so they’re even donating like a portion of the profits to local racial justice causes and when the cardboard fans are all over they’re gonna try to create a collage of all the different thousands of people who submitted photos of themselves and had themselves printed on cardboard and try to put that up around the city is sort of this like odd perhaps representation of this moment but also just of the community of people who kind of showed up and got through it very cool no the Oakland roots is the name of this team and they’re a minor league soccer team that was this story that stood out to me the most in your piece just because if as you said that it’s sort of representative of the local community of people that have rallied behind this for this team so what’s in it for the fan is it basically just our way of extending a little bit of help to the team in this time it’s partly about supporting your favorite team but I also think that in a lot of cases these cardboard cutouts are gonna be placed in TV viewable seats and I could get to this later but whether you actually see yourself on TV is kind of difficult but the idea is I mean if you’ve ever gone to a sports game in general I think a lot of people will go back and watch the highlight reel to see if they can see themselves I am NOT a sports person but when I was a kid I went to Fenway Park in Boston a few times and like I would always watch ESPN the next day and I would just try to get a gun to myself and I task like one of my parents or someone who didn’t show up with like trying to find me on TV and so this is like this is more of a guarantee that you’ll actually see yourself because not all the stadium seats are gonna be filled with cardboard cutouts and so the cardboard cutters that do exist are gonna be prioritized in TV viewable seats in a lot of cases I’m obviously a very seemed a team and yeah but I did mention that whether you actually find yourself as difficult because um a lot of cases you’re not like the companies that are doing cardboard fans are not going to send you individual photos so it is up to you to seek yourself out on TV and to watch a stream but I do think I do think an element of this is definitely we want to support our team but it’s also I mean it’s also kind of just a way to connect more broadly with the act like the participation of sports and of being a sports fan and it’s kind of just a fun thing that you can do in this moment when we’re all kind of desperate for fun things and I mean I like looked around and talked to some people and so for instance there’s like a woman in Australia who submitted a cardboard cutout of her dog for a rugby game recently and then I also spoke to a man in the UK who sent a photo of his late father who was a big fan of one of these teams in order to have him be on the broadcast and so there’s definitely an element of like haha why not but there’s also I mean really real sentimental value and this for a lot of people very cool well I’m gonna let you go because in about a half an hour we were gonna tune into a British soccer game where you have bought a cardboard cutout of your father who’s not a fan of this team but just as part of the process of importing this you’re gonna see if you can find him on this televised broadcast right yes yes I’m not optimistic about this at all but obviously as a journalist I have to go through with this work and I have to watch this game and try to find him and the photo I took of my dad he has a little sign that says the hustle on it which is literally just printer paper that I printed out but it would be really cool if I could got a screenshot of that so if any of you happen to watch this game and you see a 67 year old man holding bustled please let me know that’s good alright we’ll see if we can find him and if that anecdote makes it into the story it might actually end up getting cut in a fantasy alright thanks Michael thank you you [Music]