Nobody compares teams like a consumer
If sports fandom worked like buying a car, everyone would gravitate to whichever franchise wins most consistently, and the league would end up with a handful of enormous fan bases and the rest nearly empty. That plainly is not what happens, because almost nobody arrives at a team through comparison. They arrive through a parent, a city, a specific memory of a specific night.
I did not evaluate my team against its rivals before committing to it, and I would guess almost nobody reading this did either. The choice, such as it was, had already been made for most of us before we were capable of making it rationally.
Why that is actually the healthy version
A league where allegiance followed performance would be a worse spectacle, not a better one: fewer genuine rivalries, thinner arenas during rebuilding years, and an audience that evaporates the moment a team stops winning rather than sitting through the years that make winning meaningful when it eventually arrives.
The inherited, geographic, accidental nature of fandom is what keeps buildings full during years that offer no rational reason to attend. It is not a bug in how people relate to sport; it is closer to the entire mechanism that makes a losing season survivable for a franchise and worth returning to the following year.
A commitment nobody would make coldly
Seen from outside, caring intensely about the won-loss record of a group of strangers wearing a particular sweater is a strange thing to do, and no amount of argument fully rescues it from that strangeness. I think that is fine. Fandom was never supposed to be a rational transaction; it functions as a standing commitment made once, mostly by accident, and then honoured out of loyalty rather than reassessed like an investment.
That is also why trying to talk someone out of supporting a bad team with the record book rarely works and, in my view, misses the entire point of what they are doing. The record was never the reason they started, so it is a strange thing to expect it to be the reason they stop.