The Mirage of Unconditional Brand Love

How much would you pay someone to treat you badly?

The NFL is back, but watching every game this season could cost $973 across nine platforms. In England, Arsenal raised season ticket prices for the fifth consecutive year, and Newcastle halved the discount for supporters with disabilities from 50% to 25%. At the U.S. Open, many New Yorkers are being priced out as mid-priced seats disappear, while hospitality suites are booming.

FIFA went further this summer with the lovers of the ‘Beautiful Game.’ Ads inside fake ‘hydration breaks.’ Misleading seat maps. Tickets averaging $1,408. Dynamic pricing. A resale system that charged a 15% fee to both buyer and seller. And the U.S. president phoning in to get a suspension overturned for his team.

But fans showed up anyway. The 2026 World Cup had 99.7% occupancy and more than 6.8 million fans in attendance.

The more the pattern repeats, the more one question sticks with me: How much abuse and betrayal can love take?

Wherever there’s passion, someone’s draining it.

Sport isn’t the only love being abused.

Every September, EA Sports FC releases a full-priced, near-identical game, effectively forcing players to abandon their hard-earned progress. Despite fans rating the series a dismal 2.9 out of 10 three years running, it remains Europe’s best-selling video game.

The K-pop industry goes further, turning albums into raffle tickets. Each copy buys another chance to meet the band. Fans entering those draws bought an average of 6.7 copies of the same album; one bought 80.

So the lesson seems to be brutally simple. Fandom is an extraction business: if they love you, lucky you, charge them. If they protest, don’t listen. Charge them again.

Sounds like the famous quote commonly attributed to Marquis de Sade (yes, the man sadism is named after): “It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.”

Love slowly dies of betrayals.

But what if the extraction business has a catch?

Anaïs Nin wrote the diagnosis almost a century ago: “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

Love dies slowly, and the money hides it. The payments are still coming long after the joy is gone.

Love leaves before the money does.

Being a fan is a stack of behaviors: you watch, amplify the lore, wear merch everywhere, run fan accounts, write wiki entries, drag friends to games, and put your kids in a replica kit two sizes too big before they can walk.

Anyone can pay. Only a fan does the rest. Abuse it and you’ll see your crowd change. Track only the money, and the tourist replaces the diehard before you notice and you’ve lost your fandom.

Ask Disney. When Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, it bought more than a franchise. It bought a fandom that had already carried Star Wars through 16 years without a new theatrical film, from “Return of the Jedi” in 1983 to “The Phantom Menace” in 1999. Fans ran clubs, published fanzines, made their own films, and passed the originals to their children, while licensed novels, comics, and games kept the galaxy expanding.

When “The Mandalorian” and Baby Yoda arrived in 2019, the mania helped launch Disney+.

Then Disney flooded the zone. Series after series shipped to feed the platform, and beloved characters got bent to fill a content calendar.

The audience started leaving, exactly the way Nin said love leaves. “The Force Awakens” did $2.07 billion in 2015. “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the first Star Wars film since 2019, ended its run at $345 million, the lowest-grossing live-action film in franchise history. And “The Acolyte” got canceled after one season.

No single number proves why an audience left. But revenue from the years before could not warn Disney what was happening to the relationship. It could only show how much inherited love remained available to convert.

Bruce Springsteen’s 2023–2025 tour tickets went on sale in 2022, and dynamic pricing pushed some seats past $4,000. The tour grossed over $700 million. Backstreets, the fan magazine that had covered him since 1980, shut down—its editor describing fans as “dispirited, downhearted and yes, disillusioned.” Which number tells you more about the future: $700 million in tour revenue or the disappearance of 43 years of unpaid devotion?

Sport is showing symptoms of its own. Forty-seven percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say highlights are replacing live games. Premier League domestic viewing fell by double digits in the same season the league signed a record broadcast deal.

The money is still coming. The source is visibly draining.

Love can be valued and given back.

There’s another model, a virtuous one: respect the love from day one. Treat fandom as a two-way relationship and a source to replenish. It makes money too, a lot of it.

“Baldur’s Gate 3” is a sprawling Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game from Larian, an independent Belgian studio. Its fans are the generational kind, raised on dice and rulebooks, and they’d waited 23 years since “Baldur’s Gate 2.”

Larian shipped it with no microtransactions, no season pass, no paid downloadable content, and two years of free updates. Players answered at scale: 875,000 of them in the game at the same moment on Steam, one of the ten biggest counts in the platform’s history, more than 20 million copies sold, Game of the Year 2023. The studio went from a €214,000 loss in 2022 to €249 million in profit the following year.

Beyond revenue, fans did their own work. On the game’s third anniversary, Larian counted 13,000 fan-made mods downloaded 500 million times. Players have written about 852,000 Steam reviews at 96% positive, and in January they gave the game Steam’s Labor of Love award. Larian’s revenue matters. But so does everything the fans built for free on top of it.

I know the short term runs everything these days: the quarter, the dashboard, the record-revenue slide. But love is the longest game a brand gets to play. A business that depends on fandom has to watch more than what fans pay. It has to watch what they still do that nobody paid for.

So, run one audit this week. List everything your fans still do for you that you don’t charge for and couldn’t buy: the subtitles, the fanzines, the mods, the kids they’re raising into fans. Don’t squeeze it into another score. Just ask whether there is more of it or less of it than there was a year ago.

Then turn the audit around. What did you give back? What did you protect? What did you make better? What did you decide not to monetize?

Revenue will tell you how much love you converted. This will tell you how much remains.

Somewhere tonight, a kid is being handed a jersey two sizes too big. That’s the forecast revenue can’t give you.

This piece was originally published on LBBOnline in September 2026.

About the Writer

Edouard N’Diaye is a director of strategy at SYLVAIN, based in NYC. He’s led brand strategy for Amazon, Spotify, and American Express. He’s particularly interested in sports fandom and how it shapes culture and society.