Sports help bind communities and shape regional narratives.

Whether you are a sports fan or not, I can recommend the documentary series "Welcome to Wrexham" as a fun look into the people and community of sports. (The show is about how while everyone was watching Ted Lasso, Rob McElhenny of It's Always Sunny and Ryan Reynolds of too many movies to name bought the Football Club of Wrexham, a Welsh city.)

I guess we have different definitions of critical. We'll have to agree to disagree on sports being critical. More important to some than others, but hard sell on making it critical. Knowing if there's a tornado coming--critical. Knowing if there's horrendous traffic accident--critical. Local sports team got their arses handed to them--interesting. One of these things is not like the others

If you are only interested in disasters, I suppose, but even then: knowing that there's going to be a sports-related "riot" in local bars and venue-adjacent streets can be pretty critical information that is useful when it is timely. There are definitely cities where you need to know every time there is a local game and roughly what the mood of the crowd is, because crowd physics and mob mentalities. There are "sports-related disasters" in the weather of those cities.