As you can see from his post, Frank does not think watching sports is a good use of our time and money, and thinks it provides the spectator only with the distraction of empty pleasure. But why does watching sports give us pleasure in the first place?

It's much easier to see why we compete in sports. We compete to test our physical capabilities against other people and (hopefully) demonstrate our superiority. We train to prepare ourselves for physical battles which may or may not come. But why do we take interest in and derive pleasure from watching others compete? Why do heterosexual men strangely prefer to watch other men compete to staring at Blanka Vlasic?

I think we watch sports for the same reasons we read novels - to
provide our minds with dramatic stories which teach us lessons useful
in life's various struggles.

There is an enormous potential survival value for a species in being able to hypothesize non-obtaining states of affairs — imagining, contrary to known facts, what it would be for the neighboring tribe to attack the camp when the men are out hunting, or what it would be to travel in an area where water is scarce. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides talk about the advantages of “decoupled” imaginative acts, Michelle Sugiyama writes of fictions as a kind of imaginative preparation for dealing with real-world problems, and Pinker himself uses a games analogy in How the Mind Works (1997): “Life is like chess, and plots [in fiction] are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits.”

Watching men compete at, say, football gives us information which we might find useful someday in competitive situations which do not involve grass or a ball the same way that watching Hamlet gives us information useful at some of those times when we do not find ourselves wondering whether to kill our uncle who rules Denmark. The lessons to be learned by watching sports range from those easily summarized such as "keep your stick on the ice" to the more complex and subtle, such as getting a feel for how much unselfishness is too much when working on a team. A long time ago the sports-watching tribes outcompeted and defeated the tribes which held sports competitions but no one bothered to watch.

Basically, spectator sports serve pretty much the same purpose as country music, novels, drama, paintings etc. Not exactly the same purpose - what we learn from sports is not terribly useful for the purposes of courtship and mating - but they are similar adaptations. Roughly speaking, the Champions League is not the opiate of the masses but the Shakespeare of the masses.