Why Sports Make You Unhappy According to Science
On Monday, the world of European football was hit by a seismic shake-up that threatens to alter the DNA of the biggest sport on earth. The formation of an invitation-only European Super League , which will compete with the continent’s 12 largest economic clubs, sharing generous sums of money, is outraging the sport’s 4 billion fans around the world.
While this is a watershed moment in the sport’s nearly 150-year history of dominance on the continent, the hot emotions sparked by the formation of the Super League should be familiar to sports fans of all stripes, from long-suffering Marlins season ticket holders to those ready to defend the Arizona Coyotes Hockey Team. » Year after year: sport makes us unhappy.
Professional sports leagues provide an opportunity for the general public to unite around a common identity, which is inherently good. It’s just that the prevailing mood of many sports teams and their undying fans these days is overwhelming collective pain.
So why is it that millions of sports fans are tormented by the support of teams that constantly fail? And are there ways to break the cycle of crushing disappointment while maintaining our cherished loyalty?
Science is clear: Sport really makes us unhappy
In a 2018 study, researchers from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom examined the link between poverty and English football and found that bad feelings after losing a team were always felt more intense than the joy of winning. Their methodology was to survey 32,000 respondents about their emotional state at various stages of the day using location data to determine if respondents were in or around a football stadium during a match.
As detailed in the Washington Post, researchers soon learned that defeat has a much stronger impact on fans than victory:
The researchers found that within the hour immediately after their team wins, the typical fan can feel about 3.9 points happier than usual – about the same as listening to music. This is more than offset by the 7.8 points of additional sadness that fans will experience an hour after their team’s loss, an event that makes respondents about twice as sad as after work, school, or waiting in line.
This study signals dire news for sports fans around the world, as your team is much more likely to lose than it will be the next Showtime Lakers. There’s a reason ESPN has what it calls the Sports Misery Index formula : There is only one champion each season, and more often than not, it’s the team that won it before, often recently . The likelihood that your favorite team will reach the top is usually determined by many factors outside of the game itself: the size of the market in the team’s hometown, the type of support and sponsors it attracts, and the salaries it can use to attract the best players: All of them are more likely to influence a team’s success than ethereal factors such as team spirit or chemistry, and if loyal fans mattered, the Chicago Cubs would not have lived a century as an outsider.
There’s a reason that LeBron James’s NBA championship win with the Cleveland Cavaliers was an anomaly: a small market-based team with no previous titles beat a rising and wealthy rival from the Golden State Warriors, and such failures are rare, which makes them all the more sweet when ( if) they happen. While the opposite result – a small market team with no previous titles, unable to win a large sum – this is what most sporting seasons consist of.
Human psychology means we expect to be miserable
You probably won’t hear much about Sigmund Freud in the Major League stadium, but sports psychologist Tom Ferraro makes a connection between modern fandom and the forefather of psychoanalysis. He tells Lifehacker that joy is a fleeting feeling in everyday life, which is why some sports fans are probably more at home supporting unhappy teams.
“Perhaps, as Freud would say, [that] life is truly a dark affair filled with pain and suffering, so we are ready to tap into these sad, unsettling and pathetic emotions,” he writes in an email. “Joy is a much rarer emotion, so it carries less weight.”
Fans also identify with teams that they can communicate with based on class. Ferraro points to the New York Mets and Yankees baseball teams as prime examples of this dynamic:
In New York, I noticed that fans who love the Metz tend to be middle and lower class, while those who love the Yankees may aspire to the upper class or identify with [him]. Cognitively, it is consonant to communicate with a team with which you feel connected with status. This is Leon Festinger’s theory, although it has never been applied to sports.
In other words, people who aspire to become “winners” in a more superficial sense may flock to more successful franchises, because watching these teams take another trophy into the air gives them a sense of personal triumph.
How to get out of the loop
One way to keep a failed sports franchise from defining your happiness is to simply tell yourself that its results shouldn’t matter to your love life. But for a lot of fans, this is easier said than done. Ferraro explains that this problem often stems from what Freud called repetition compulsion, in which the patient tries to resolve the trauma by unconsciously returning to its source over and over again.
In general, if a team constantly lets you down, you can continue to watch that team for years to unknowingly resolve your negative emotions. Or, as Ferraro explains, “The emotion of anger and frustration in a loser-identifying fan is their way of dealing with those emotions. Thus, they remain loyal to the losing teams. “
The easiest way to break this cycle is simply to admit that it exists. Sports don’t have to make you unhappy, but if you realize that this is exactly what they are doing, you will discover your first and best chance to get rid of their influence on your mood. Take a step back, get rid of the seasonal rollercoaster of suffering, and start taking a clearer look at your relationship with your favorite team.