An amusing observation from Pliny the Younger, as quoted in David Potter’s book The Victor’s Crown: A History of Sport from Homer to Byzantium (2012). Some things don’t change much!

I am not in the least bit interested in that sort of entertainment [chariot racing]. There is nothing new, nothing different, nothing that it does not suffice to have seen but once. For this reason I am all the more astonished that so many thousands of people desire so childishly to watch horses run, and see men ride chariots again and again. If they were drawn by the speed of the horses or the skill of the drivers, that would be one thing; now, however, they cheer for a piece of cloth, the love a piece of cloth, and if, in the middle of a race this colour would be transferred to that man, and that colour to this one, the partisanship and favour would change with it, and suddenly they would leave those charioteers and those horses, that they recognize at a distance and whose names they shout.