When Hartford Athletic drew 2-2 in their home opener against Indy Eleven, the biggest complaint for some fans wasn’t the result on the field, but the size of the beer cups in the stands.
The first $2 beer night of the season featured reduced-size cups, which look comically small in the hands of fans, and the change prompted an outcry. To some, the particularities of $2 beverages are the irrelevant concerns of a bunch of beer-drenched obsessives. And if a relatively minor change to one promotion was all that was going on, it might truly go down as just grumbling.
But it’s not just about the beer. In terms of what’s happening in Hartford in 2026 – at least in terms of the fan experience – the shrinking beer cups seem to be only one problem among many, with fans also complaining about issues with parking, season ticketholder perks, obstructed views of the pitch, poor interactions with security vendor CSC, lines, amenities, and frankly just about everything that could even be the subject of a complaint.
In short, the entire experience of attending a Hartford Athletic game has been enshittified.
Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe how online products and services degrade over time. Doctorow was initially concerned with how Amazon had degraded the service it offered to both buyers and sellers in order to increase its own shareholder value. The concept has subsequently been expanded to describe the slow-but-sure decay of a multitude of things, from social media like Facebook and Twitter/X to gig-economy services like Uber as well as dating apps, Google search and the Unity game engine.
In Doctorow’s analysis, enshittification is driven by the location these products and services occupy as players in a two-sided market. On the one hand, these companies have users who consume the product or utilize the service, and on the other side, they have business customers (Amazon sellers, Uber drivers, advertisers on Google). Sports teams may not be a classic example of a participant in a two-sided market, but there are some similarities; a club exists as a middleman between the players who provide the core service of actually playing soccer and the fans who watch it as well as between third-party vendors such as food trucks or the jersey manufacturer and the fans who buy from them.
The point here is that enshittification isn’t simply a set of business practices peculiar to a certain kind of industry; it’s also a mindset. One in which the experience of the end-user is subordinated to other concerns.
It’s a mindset that mistakes short-term profit and loss for value, and fails to adequately engage with the reality that a positive fan experience is one of the main drivers of the value of a club. And at Hartford Athletic this season, this mindset has been on full display. It’s a mindset that creates a perk for season ticket members, such as a coupon, without ensuring that there’s a process in place to make sure all vendors can (and will!) redeem the coupons. It’s a mindset that makes operational changes – to parking, to stadium access, to whatever – without fully executing a plan to effectively communicate those changes to the fans.
Only a club guided by this mindset could stumble into touching the third rail of sports fans – access to cheap booze – without obvious consideration of how a significant change to what was previously one of the club’s most successful promotional tactics will impact the bigger picture.
And in the short term, perhaps there’s an advantage to be gained. Splitting 60 ounces of beer into six cups rather than five, all sold at the same price of $2, is financially sound if you can sell the same overall volume. And if your goal is to turn a profit – or at least make less of a loss – on this specific Saturday night, it’s possible that the club could achieve success.
And this is key to the enshittification mindset. Future return on investment is always subordinated to short-term profit and the decisions that flow from that. Whether it’s reducing the size of the beer cups or raising the price of parking, decisions aren’t made with ‘what makes people want to come to the stadium’ at the front of mind.
But long-term success is built by making people want to come to the stadium. When fans come to Trinity Health Stadium, they want things to work. They want the staff in the parking lot to recognize their parking pass and direct them to the right lot. They want a porta-potty available for their tailgating festivities. They want to pick up their season ticket holder scarves in a well-managed line. They want vendors inside the stadium to honor their coupons. They want an unobstructed view of the game.
And they want to feel like this experience is not also being made deliberately worse. They don’t want their $2 beers to get any smaller, or to see the quality or quantity of season ticket holder goodies reduced.
It’s easy to say that so much of this enshittification is accidental. That staff turnover in operations, in ticketing, in communications, in practically every front office department has led to a loss of institutional knowledge that has caused missteps that are easily correctable.
Just as an example, three of the four staff currently listed on the team website under "operations" have been in their current roles with the club since January 2026. Two of those staff members started with the organization in March, at almost exactly the same time as the USL Championship season. Regardless of their skills or abilities, these are people who have been placed firmly behind the eight-ball. But they would, in all probability, get things right as they settle into their roles.
Leaving aside – for now – the question of why there has been so much turnover in the front office (over 35 employees have departed in less than 24 months, for a club that currently only lists 25 total staff members), it’s also incomplete to suggest that the operational problems that have plagued the club this season are simply downstream of turnover.
