sports and that feels like a theat to them. And because they already hate you for that they will sift through all thing related to you and find things to support their feelings for you and then hang on to them for use when needing reminding why they hate you having forgotten it is just a game and assigning all the negative traits they’ve hand-selected to support their narrative to all things related to your team be it fans, media, players, locales, religions, students, etc.
Sounds about like us humans. I have no I’ll feelings towards Nebraska because we don’t play them and I don’t feel threatened by them.