Chiefs vs Seahawks: A Battle of the Fans

The premise of the expressive voting theory is that both instrumental demand and expressive demand are required to explain why people vote because both aspects of demand contribute to voters' utility. In general, according to microeconomics, the utility derived from expressiveness must be summed with the instrumental demand, which is based upon usefulness, to explain the demand for any good. Some goods, services, and actions, however, such as cheering at a football game, have no instrumental demand. Though when an entire stadium erupts the fans collectively might have the ability to affect the game by making it difficult for teams to communicate and creating an intimidating environment, no individual fan can be heard by the players and thus makes no discernible difference on the outcome of the game. It thus makes no sense to cheer from the perspective of usefulness, and yet people cheer nonetheless. Thus, it can be concluded that people derive a large amount of utility from expressing support for their team.

The Seahawks, who claim to be home of the 12th man due to their particularly raucous stadium, appear to derive the most utility of any fan base from expressiveness. There was a battle for the record of loudest stadium during last season: "Seahawks fans set the record first, then Chiefs fans broke it, then Seahawks fans got the record back," by achieving a sound level of 137.6 decibels, "the equivalent to a military jet taking off from an aircraft carrier." However, fans of the Chiefs are attempting to demonstrate to the world that they indeed receive more utility from expressing support for their team in spite of their individual inability to alter the results of the game; on Monday, "Chiefs fans at Arrowhead Stadium will try and break the world record for loudest stadium." In the NFL, cheering is particularly futile because of the frequent use of silent signal calling; only audible calls - changes made at the line of scrimmage - must be executed verbally, and not all quarterbacks have the authority from coaches to make them.