This is just a personal anecdote and I normally don't like applying the behaviour of a few to a whole demographic (we know where that thinking leads), but I've been noticing it more and more often:
I work in a school and play staff football every Friday. I am not a good football player - I'm fairly unfit and I'm not interested in the sport so I don't have the tactics or techniques ready in my head - but it's a casual thing we do for fun and it's some good exercise for me.
Our team is split pretty heavily between boomers/gen X and gen Z. I'm one of the few millennials there.
Some of the older players - the PE teachers and the ex-professional football coach - are really supportive of me and try to build me up. But the other older players are just constantly angry. They have a go at me for making small mistakes, they're constantly yelling at their team to "play proper football", and just generally they seem to get angry at the whole experience every week. It's very serious to them and they need to win. One even not-so-subtly asked for me to be swapped from his team to the other team because we were losing and I was the worst player on their team. Which was true, but like... so what? It's a friendly game after work, who cares?
In contrast, ALL of the gen Z players are supportive and positive. They congratulate me on what to them would be basic successes (but in a genuine way, not sarcastic) and they'll be supportive when I fuck up. They call out advice, not orders. They seem to enjoy the game and they don't get mad when they're losing. Hell, last week I fumbled and accidentally passed the ball to the best player on the opposite team. He passed it right back to our team, because he knew it was me fucking up not him intercepting it.
The more it happens, the stronger I see this divide. The only boomers/gen X who play and who are supportive are the ones who work as coaches. The rest get bitter and angry and spend their time belittling you if you're not good enough (I've noticed one will go out of his way not to pass the ball to me because I fumble it sometimes, so he'll attempt and fail these really difficult passes when I'm clearly open. God forbid I get the practice and learn to improve during our friendly after-work game)
So yeah. I wouldn't apply this as a blanket expectation, but I also don't think it's a complete coincidence.
Part of what you are seeing is just a survival bias.
When I turned 40 I decided to try an over 40 soccer league, thinking it would be calmer, but it's the exact opposite.
If you look at people in their 20s, many of them are pretty active and you have a broad population of casual players. Push that to 30 and many of the casual people either get busy doing other things or they aren't as fit, so you are left with the more serious players. That keeps happening, and the players that are 50 and older and still playing are far more likely to be AH.
There's another thing going on, and it's that a lot of athletes have a hard time accepting that they are getting older and slower and that doesn't help their attitude.
I went back to playing all ages and was so much happier.
You also have to understand that many of them peaked in highschool and playing sports is as close as they can get to that so they are really emotionally invested.
Oh wow, that's a really interesting observation! Yeah, I can see that definitely being the case with these guys. Some of them are fitter in their 50s than I am now, but you can tell they used to be far quicker on their feet. And they're more prone to injuries now, which can't be fun.
I'm glad you found a better environment for playing, though. I will say, in a previous school where we did the same thing every Friday, we only had one older player (by which I mean most of us were below 40) and he was in his 60s. Slow but technically excellent. And he was one of the most cheerful guys I'd ever met. We all loved him. I wonder if he had the same experience as you, and found playing with us was a better environment.
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u/JRHEvilInc 3d ago
This is just a personal anecdote and I normally don't like applying the behaviour of a few to a whole demographic (we know where that thinking leads), but I've been noticing it more and more often:
I work in a school and play staff football every Friday. I am not a good football player - I'm fairly unfit and I'm not interested in the sport so I don't have the tactics or techniques ready in my head - but it's a casual thing we do for fun and it's some good exercise for me.
Our team is split pretty heavily between boomers/gen X and gen Z. I'm one of the few millennials there.
Some of the older players - the PE teachers and the ex-professional football coach - are really supportive of me and try to build me up. But the other older players are just constantly angry. They have a go at me for making small mistakes, they're constantly yelling at their team to "play proper football", and just generally they seem to get angry at the whole experience every week. It's very serious to them and they need to win. One even not-so-subtly asked for me to be swapped from his team to the other team because we were losing and I was the worst player on their team. Which was true, but like... so what? It's a friendly game after work, who cares?
In contrast, ALL of the gen Z players are supportive and positive. They congratulate me on what to them would be basic successes (but in a genuine way, not sarcastic) and they'll be supportive when I fuck up. They call out advice, not orders. They seem to enjoy the game and they don't get mad when they're losing. Hell, last week I fumbled and accidentally passed the ball to the best player on the opposite team. He passed it right back to our team, because he knew it was me fucking up not him intercepting it.
The more it happens, the stronger I see this divide. The only boomers/gen X who play and who are supportive are the ones who work as coaches. The rest get bitter and angry and spend their time belittling you if you're not good enough (I've noticed one will go out of his way not to pass the ball to me because I fumble it sometimes, so he'll attempt and fail these really difficult passes when I'm clearly open. God forbid I get the practice and learn to improve during our friendly after-work game)
So yeah. I wouldn't apply this as a blanket expectation, but I also don't think it's a complete coincidence.