The Sports Conspiracy That’s Too Easy to Believe

The San Francisco 49ers will not be playing in the Super Bowl, because they lost to the Seattle Seahawks by a disgraceful score of 41 to 6 over the weekend. But of course, “someone wins, someone loses” is never the whole story in sports.

Some fans are now buying into the narrative that the team had no chance because it suffered a suspicious number of devastating injuries over the course of the season (as well as in recent past seasons). Any fan could rattle off a list—quarterback Brock Purdy has dealt with several injuries (coming off a torn UCL a couple of years ago), three key players tore their ACLs this season, and one also tore his MCL. While the team was getting demolished by the Seahawks, tight end Jake Tonges went down with a plantar-fascia injury. To explain this, some fans pointed to the fact that the team’s practice field and stadium are near an electrical substation and suggested that the electromagnetic waves emanating from it could be weakening players’ bodies, making them especially susceptible to soft-tissue injuries such as tendon tears and muscle strains.

“The 49ers absolutely should spend whatever it takes ($20 million?) to move the electrical substation away from their practice facility,” one viral post suggested during the game. Reporters are now asking team leadership about the issue; on Wednesday afternoon, the team’s general manager, John Lynch, said in a press conference that he’s actively looking into the situation. “We’ve been reaching out to anyone and everyone to see Does a study exist?” he said.

To be clear, the concerns are baseless. The United States has thousands of electrical substations; people live near them, and other sports teams practice next to them, too. Some scientists say that you can never totally rule out the possibility that this type of ambient electromagnetic exposure might cause harm, but they have also looked for decades without producing any convincing evidence of such harm. Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist and the author of 2008’s Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology, was part of a group of scientists looking for a possible association between electromagnetic-field exposure and breast cancer in the 1990s. They didn’t find any. “We’re dealing with a very weak form of energy,” he told me. There is just no proven way for these weak fields to disrupt human cells, so long as their frequencies stay below the threshold that causes tissue heating (as happens in a microwave).

But fans believe what they believe. They are obligated to live in a state of unceasing anxiety, superstition, and fear of their team being cursed. The power-plant theory is an iteration of that tradition—a movement away from mystical explanations such as the Curse of the Billy Goat and toward shareable deep dives, investigations, and dot-connecting. With all the tools available to them in the digital age (reams of hard data, unlimited multimedia “evidence”), fans can explain their teams’ worst turns of bad luck by composing what can only be called conspiracy theories. Today’s fans will go down YouTube rabbit holes; conduct amateur, open-source investigations; and cut numbers this way and that until they reveal a startling pattern.

[Read: The secret joy of baseball curses]

This particular theory is emerging during a time when alternative theories of science and medicine are central to American culture—Donald Trump’s EPA has indulged internet-y concern about chemtrails, and we’re back to bickering about conventional wisdom on some of the most basic questions of health and safety, including whether milk ought to be pasteurized. Why not take another look at electricity too, while we’re at it?

The substation theory seems to have been percolating for a while, but it blew up on social media in early January after a holistic-health influencer named Peter Cowan posted a lengthy, scientific-sounding explanation of how “low-frequency electromagnetic fields can degrade collagen, weaken tendons, and cause soft-tissue damage at levels regulators call ‘safe.’” He referred to the 49ers as a “real world case study,” and a faction of 49ers fans latched on. Chase Senior, a popular online commentator within 49ers fandom, shared parts of Cowan’s theory on X (leaving out some of its odder digressions, such as one about the Cold War), and contributed significantly to its spread.

“When it gets to the point where the team is so injured every single season, I think that it is fair to look into anything and everything to try to determine why they’ve been so hurt,” Senior told me. Initially, most people were hostile to the idea. They called him, he said, an “idiot.” Some people still call him that, and theorize that the injuries likely have something to do with the style of the team’s play or its approach to strength and conditioning or stretching and recovery. Many also pointed out that the 49ers are fairly old, as a team, and that they played on short rest a few times this season.

Indeed, the most obvious explanation for the 49ers’ problem is that football is a violent sport. The NFL has an injury epidemic, Matt Maiocco, a 49ers beat reporter for NBC Sports Bay Area, reminded me when I called to ask about the substation theory. “There’s three kinds of football players,” he said. “Guys who have been injured, guys who are already injured, and guys who will be injured.” The team has practiced in the same spot in Santa Clara for decades, he pointed out, and the substation has been there for much of that time. I asked him whether the 49ers really have had particularly bad luck with injuries the past few years. “It feels that way,” he said. “And I think the closer you are to something, the more it feels that way.” (Sports bloggers who crunch the numbers find that they are among the more injured teams—but to reiterate, all football teams are very injured.)

None of these explanations is very compelling to Senior, who has continued bringing the conspiracy theory up online, with increasing defensiveness. He says he noticed a shift during the postseason. “The Niners continued to get hurt,” he said. During the first round of the playoffs, on January 11, the 49ers beat the defending Super Bowl champions, the Philadelphia Eagles. But tight end George Kittle, one of their best players, went down early in the game with a torn Achilles tendon—the type of devastating injury that happens out of nowhere. With that, more fans and commentators grew intrigued, and others started to couch their disapproval of the theory. Even if odds are low that there’s anything to it, is it so hard for someone to check it out?

Some current and former football players have started talking about the substation theory and giving it credibility. The 49ers wide receiver Kendrick Bourne joked about the situation himself after the game against the Eagles. A reporter asked why his team was suffering so many injuries. “Yeah, it’s that power plant,” he said. “Nah, I’m just playing, I don’t know.” He went on with a more typical professional-athlete answer along the lines of how injuries are really unfortunate, but you have to have a next-man-up mentality and keep going, etc.

Now that a pattern has been proposed, it will become only more visible. Each time a 49er is injured, the power plant will come up again (mirroring the endless repeatability of the #DiedSuddenly anti-vaccine conspiracy theory, which was, for a time, invoked whenever someone died unexpectedly). But it also isn’t that serious. The reporter who asked Lynch about the substation seemed embarrassed to be talking about it, and most reasonable people clearly understand that the idea is far-fetched. Some fans are having fun with it and indulging in a little gallows humor to help them get over a disappointing end to their season.

The electromagnetic waves aren’t powerful enough to hurt an NFL player—the real question is whether the story about them is powerful enough to become a durable piece of 49ers lore. When I asked a friend of mine who grew up as a 49ers fan about the substation, she waved it off and proposed an alternative theory for the heartbreaking losses and horrifically timed injuries of the past 10 years. She said that she didn’t know anything about EMFs, but that this was something all true fans believe: The 49ers should never have left Candlestick Park, their beloved old home in San Francisco, where they reigned in their glory days, to go to Levi’s Stadium, their bland, uninspiring new one in Santa Clara, where they have seen nothing but suffering. When they did that, they offended the universe, the Earth, or God. That was serious.