🌀 Rejoice, We Won

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Sunday, late afternoon. The game ends and you type it into the group chat before you've thought about it: we're 1-0.

You've never met the quarterback. You've never been inside the stadium. You didn't run a single yard, and you couldn't name the left guard under oath. The pronoun came out anyway, and nobody in the chat blinked.

Now try the other version out loud. "They won." About your own team, after a good game. It sounds like a resignation letter, or the first line of a breakup.

The word is so small you never notice it working. Seventeen centuries ago, somebody in Roman North Africa made the same claim of membership, and it took a lot more than two letters. They made it in lead, buried it in a grave, and addressed it to a demon.

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Hadrumetum, in what's now Tunisia, ran a Roman circus in the 200s AD. From its graves came folded lead sheets with curses inside. One side of a typical Hadrumetum tablet shows a bearded demon on a ship, torch in hand, with horses' names scratched onto the hull: Noctivagus, Tiberis, Oceanus. The other side orders him to torment and kill the Greens' and Whites' horses and to kill four drivers by name: Clarus, Felix, Primulus and Romanus.

Roughly 80 circus curses survive, and horses outnumber people on them; the African tablets name around 1,200. Professionals made them in batches and buried them with the dead, who were expected to carry the message downstairs. Who paid is still argued over: stable owners hedging money, rival drivers, gamblers, or plain fans.

The detail that matters is the color. Roman racing had four teams, Blues, Greens, Reds and Whites, and every city with a track had all four, so nobody had a hometown team. You picked a color, and the color was the whole loyalty. A century earlier, Pliny the Younger complained that if drivers swapped tunics mid-race, the crowd would switch sides and desert the men they'd been screaming for by name.

Read the tablet as a ritual and it turns into a spectator with no hand in the race buying himself one. Magic is what people do when they care about an outcome they can't touch. The color was the category. The curse was the claim of membership.

The pronoun does the tablet's job at a fraction of the price.

Say "we won" and you've filed a claim: some of this victory is mine. Nobody checks the paperwork, and the players never sign off. The claim gets honored anyway, because everyone around you is filing the same one. A "we" is a membership card you print yourself.

Watch how the card gets used, though. When the team wins, it's "we"; when it loses, it turns into "they" by Monday, and the coach gets fired in the third person. The pronoun flexes to protect the person saying it, and that flexibility is the tell. "We" describes a wish about who you are, and the wish gets louder in the weeks when your own life has gone badly.

The strange part is how good people are at this. The same trick that lets you claim a stranger's touchdown lets a few hundred million strangers call themselves a country. Nobody meets a nation; they meet a flag, an anthem and a pronoun. Fandom is the low-stakes gym where people train the muscle that nations run on.

The Romans knew the shape of it. Their color had no city, no home ground and no reason beyond itself, and it still got people to bury spells. In Constantinople in 532, Blues and Greens rioted for five days in a fight that, by the chroniclers' count, ended with thirty thousand dead. A loyalty can run for centuries on a color and a pronoun.

The 2026 season opened on a Wednesday in Seattle, and the next night the 49ers beat the Rams in Melbourne, the first regular-season game ever played in Australia. Nine games go abroad this year, across four continents. The "we" no longer needs a zip code, which is exactly how the Romans ran it.

The crowd is enormous. The 2025 regular season averaged 18.7 million viewers a game, the league's best since 1989, and NFL games were 89 of the 100 most-watched shows on American TV.

Membership now has a price. In a survey of 2,000 adults this August, 52% called fandom an important part of who they are, and 43% of people who spend on sports had gone into debt to do it, with a quarter still carrying a balance. The average fan puts about $1,970 a year into the pronoun: tickets, streams, jerseys, bets.

Then there's the jersey itself. Licensed player merchandise did over $1.9 billion in the year to February, and the headline product is a stranger's surname worn across a fan's shoulders. When the stranger is traded, the shirt goes in a drawer and a new name goes on.

Pliny's complaint has become a business model. The cloth is the loyalty. The man inside it is on a contract.

Quote: "Such mighty charms, such wondrous power reside in the color of a paltry tunic!" Pliny the Younger, Letters (early 100s AD).

Study: Students at seven universities wore more school-branded clothing the Monday after a football win, and said "we" nearly twice as often for a victory as for a defeat, 26% against 13.5% (Cialdini and colleagues, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1976).

Artifact: The replica jersey. You pay to wear another adult's surname, and when he leaves, the name is wrong but the color still fits. Pliny's paltry tunic, with a licensing deal.

If the color outlasts every player who has ever worn it, what exactly is a fan loyal to? And who benefits most when a pronoun comes with a monthly payment attached?

Strip the lead and the demon off the Hadrumetum tablet and what's left is a person with no hand in the race insisting on one. Strip the jersey and the group chat off "we won" and you find the same person. Rome's spectators hired magic. Ours borrow grammar, which is cheaper, faster and undefeated, since a claim of membership can't lose.

So "we won" is a sentence about the speaker. It says which strangers you've agreed to let hurt you, and which color you'll keep wearing when the names inside it change. The team will never hear you. The pronoun hears you every time.

Send this to the friend who texted "we're back" on kickoff night and hasn't lived in that city since college.

Find yourself in the next one,

Eren.

The Receipts

Every claim above was checked against these before it went out. If one doesn't hold up, reply and tell me.

The artifact

The numbers

The quote, the study and the artifact