Thousands of Sports Fans Drunk After Football, Baseball Games, Study Finds

Almost one in 10 sports fans has a blood alcohol content above the legal limit as they exit the stadium after football and baseball games, a study found.

There are 100 stadiums in the U.S. that schedule 5,000 games each year attended by more than 130 million fans, according to a report today in the journal Alcoholism. The New Meadowlands stadium, where the New York Giants football team plays, has a capacity of 82,500. If this study holds, about 6,600 people, or 8 percent, leave drunk after watching a game.

The research, which involved giving breath tests to 362 attendees of 13 baseball and 3 football games, also found that 40 percent had been drinking, according to the report in the journal. Fans younger than age 35 were 9 times likelier to be above the legal limit. The use of alcohol by sports spectators is understudied, the researchers said.

“Eight percent doesn’t sound high, but translate into how many people are leaving the stadium drunk, and you have thousands of people,” said Darin Erickson, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor in epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, said in a telephone interview.

There are more alcohol-related car crashes after sports games than before or during the same time on nongame days, a previous study by Canadian researchers found. Beside the well- known link between drunk driving and accidents, fans who are drunk are likelier to hurt themselves or others, Erickson said.

Tailgate Parties

Those who attended tailgate parties had a 14 times greater risk of being inebriated than those who hadn’t attended a party. Almost 1 in 4 people who tailgated reported consuming five or more drinks while tailgating, the study found.

Fans who attended night games had higher odds of having a mid-range blood alcohol content, one that wasn’t above the legal limit, than those attending day games, the researchers said. Those who attended Monday night football games were more than four times as likely to have a mid-range blood alcohol content as fans going to other games, according to the study.

Erickson declined to say which stadiums were used in the sample. The research was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The legal limit for blood alcohol is .08%, which is 80 milligrams of alcohol per deciliter of blood, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Lopatto in New York at elopatto@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net.

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Thousands of Sports Fans Drunk After Football, Baseball

Eight percent of sports fans have a blood alcohol content above the legal limit as they exit the stadium after football and baseball games, a study found. By Michael heiman/Getty Images

Eight percent of sports fans have a blood alcohol content above the legal limit as they exit the stadium after football and baseball games, a study found. By Michael heiman/Getty Images