What is Team Bar Finder?
Team Bar Finder is an online resource to help loyal fans of a particular team find an establishment showing their team’s games surrounded by like-minded fans. If you are a Pittsburgh Steelers fan living in Phoenix or an LSU Tigers fan visiting New York City, we have you covered.
Sports fans are a passionate and social bunch. They want their game watching experience to reflect their personalities. Nobody wants to watch the game alone. Besides, fans certainly would prefer to watch the game with other fans that root for their same team. The result? We created Team Bar Finder. We want to help those fans looking to elevate their game viewing experience to include watching the games with fans just like them.
How it started
The idea to create Team Bar Finder started on January 8, 2009. How do we know the exact date? That was the date of the 2009 BCS National Championship Game between the Oklahoma Sooners and Florida Gators. Our founder, an Oklahoma Sooners fan, was in Las Vegas at that time attending a convention for work. After a long day on the convention floor, he just wanted to watch the game with other Sooners fans. Surely Las Vegas is a big enough city that there has to be an Oklahoma Sooners Bar showing the national champion game? (There is and it is the Roadrunner Saloon.)
So what was the problem? Back in 2009, there was no fast and easy way to locate a fan friendly bar in Las Vegas or any other city for that matter. Our fearless leader didn’t have the time to search fan forums and the hotel concierge was not knowledgeable of any such location. The game was starting in about an hour. He certainly did not want to go downstairs and fight to get a seat at the Race & Sports Book. He wanted to put on his Oklahoma shirt and hat and high five other Sooner fans when they scored a touchdown and console each other when they threw an interception.
Without much time to find the Las Vegas Sooners bar, he went back to his hotel roomand watched the game by himself. If only there was a better way…
How it’s going
They say necessity is the mother of all invention. From the need to find a fan bar in Las Vegas, the light bulb went on.
Launched in 2010, Team Bar Finder added it’s first location which has since shuttered its doors, and never looked back. We have added over 3,000 unique locations globally prior to 2020, the Team Bar Finder current database sits at over 2,000 locations. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 Pandemic hit the bar and restaurant industry hard and many locations went out of business. The bar and restaurant industry is quite volatile and locations can go out of business or change formats without notice.
Addintionally, some locations, especially the ones that host college fans, may change team affiliations from year to year. Alumni groups commonly will contact Team Bar Finder and inform us that they have switched watch party locations. Many times it is because the new locations offer that particular group benefits like playing the fight song, food and drink specials or opening early. Because of these changes, we rely on fans like you to let us know if there are any changes we need to be aware of and make those changes accordingly.
We have created a Team Bar Submission Form to alert our staff of new locations that may have opened or recently started welcoming a certain group of fans to watch their games. If you discover a problem with any of the listings in our database, there are multiple ways to alert us.
How are we doing?
The best way to let us know about a problem is to visit the Contact Us Page. There you can send us an email or you can leave a voicemail alerting us to the issue. In addition, you can also leave a comment on the listing to alert us of the problem.
No matter how you arrived at Team Bar Finder, welcome and we hope you enjoy your visit. We are always striving to improve this resource and encourage your feedback.
