Football's capacity to make men cry: ‘I was buying milk and just burst into tears thinking about Palace'

New York Times

20 hours ago

Forget the scoreline in the top corner of the screen. The image of the distraught Inter Milan supporter who flashed up on television screens around the world, as his team prepared to take a meaningless corner in the 76th minute, told the story of the Champions League final.
Crestfallen and broken, his bottom lip was quivering and tears were streaming down his face. A fourth Paris Saint-Germain goal had not long been scored at the other end of the stadium and it was all too much for a man who looked like his world had come to an end.
'Imagine getting like that about football?'
It's hard to explain to people who have no interest in the game why so many of us are so immersed and emotionally invested in this sport that it leads to the kind of behaviour — uncontrollable tears (of joy as well as despair), hugging total strangers, or even turning the air blue after something totally innocuous — that would be almost unthinkable in a public space anywhere else.
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Football, essentially, is escapism; a place for us to forget about the trials and tribulations of everyday life and, for better or worse, completely lose ourselves.
'It's a cathartic experience,' Sally Baker, a senior therapist, says. 'Men are very rarely given permission to express their emotions. But within the context of football, they are — and no one's going to judge them. Everyone's in it together.
'They could swear — people use language at a football match that they never would use outside. It's a safe place and it's a unique environment for men to let off steam.'
Those comments resonate on the back of something else that happened last Saturday night in Munich. With less than two minutes remaining, the television cameras showed PSG's assistant coach in tears in the technical area. His name is Rafel Pol Cabanellas and he lost his wife to a long-term illness in November last year.
With or without a heartbreaking personal story, football's capacity to stir the emotions is extraordinary. Carrying our hopes and fears, the game plays with our feelings in a way that few things in life can and, at the same time, provides a form of sanctuary.
The video features crying. A lot of crying.
It lasts for one minute and 24 seconds and was filmed at Wembley Stadium on the day of the FA Cup final.
The referee's whistle had just blown after 10 minutes of stoppage time and Crystal Palace, after 164 years of waiting, had beaten Manchester City 1-0 to finally win the first major trophy in their history.
Joao Castelo-Branco, ESPN Brazil's correspondent in the UK, had decided to leave his seat in the press box moments earlier to try to get some footage of the Palace supporters.
To describe what follows as scenes of celebration doesn't come close. It's so much more than that. It's raw. It's magical. It's moving. It's genuinely heart-warming. It's football — that simple game that means nothing and everything — touching the soul.
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'It just captured something special,' Castelo-Branco says, smiling.
So special that you find yourself watching it over and again, looking at the faces of the people — men and women, young and old — and thinking about all the stories they could tell you about how their lives became so entwined with Crystal Palace Football Club, as well as wondering why this moment means so much personally to them.
'When I was there, I was feeling, 'This is incredible, and I was just trying to hold it together',' Castelo-Branco says.
'There was so much going on that you don't know where to film. And I think sometimes then you see fans turning the camera everywhere really quickly. But I tried to hold on a bit, to rest at that couple, but then at the same time move on a bit to show that there were all these different characters that were celebrating. Everywhere I turned was a beautiful shot of emotion.'
'That couple' feature at the start of the footage, when a woman overcome with emotion falls into the arms of a man who looks like he has been following Palace for more years than he cares to remember. His eyes are filled with tears.
Behind them, another supporter of a similar age stands alone with his arms aloft, totally overwhelmed by the moment. Some fans have their hands over their mouths in disbelief, almost frozen. Others are wiping away tears with their scarves. One man is hunched over, face down and sobbing. Another supporter — his father, perhaps — wraps his arms around him and the two of them end up singing together.
People of all ages are crying everywhere you look — crying and smiling.
'It's beautiful,' Castelo-Branco adds. 'And a really special thing about it is that not many fans were filming (on their phones). People were really living that moment.'
True raw emotion, fans really living the moment.
As I joined in the stands to film this video, there were hardly any fans with their phones out. Grown men and women hugging and crying. Amazing atmosphere. #CrystalPalace beautiful ⚽️#Wembley #FACup
pic.twitter.com/kj9bZ2o1aG
— Joao Castelo-Branco (@j_castelobranco) May 18, 2025
Following Palace's triumph at Wembley, there were similar scenes a few days later in Bilbao, where Tottenham Hotspur beat Manchester United to win the Europa League. A couple of months earlier, it was Newcastle United's turn after they defeated Liverpool in the Carabao Cup final.
But it doesn't have to be a long wait for a trophy that tips people over the edge at a football match. Gary Pickles remembers being in the away end at Brighton in 2019, when Manchester City were on the verge of winning their fourth Premier League title in eight seasons, holding up his phone, filming the fans all around him, and suddenly being stopped in his tracks.
'I noticed my son, Niall, had his hands on his head and tears were streaming down his face. We were winning the league. But he's really sobbing. I was like, 'What's up?' Whatever it was just triggered him. He was about 25 — it's not like a young kid doing it.'
Pickles, who has been following Manchester City since the 1970s, makes an interesting point when we discuss whether his son's behaviour at Brighton is not as unusual as it would have been in the past.
'That video was just before Covid,' he says. 'But I think certainly since Covid, when there was a lot of talk about mental health issues, it's helped men to speak about that and maybe show their emotions.'
Looking back provides a bit of context. In an article on the BBC website in 2004, under an image of the former England international Paul Gascoigne crying at the 1990 World Cup, a clinical psychologist talked about how 'a lot of men know more about how a car works than their own emotions'.
Reading that quote again now, a couple of decades later, makes you realise how much life has changed – and in a relatively short space of time too (either that or all my mates are especially useless when it comes to knowing how to change a tyre).
'I think men have moved on hugely,' Baker, the senior therapist, says. 'I guess the old stereotype is that if men and sports were going to exhibit any emotions, it was normally anger. And there were apocryphal stories of women living in dread of their menfolk coming back if their team had lost. But men are more willing, and able, to express a fuller range of emotions than just anger.
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'I think they've changed a lot in the last 20 years. And I know that by the number of men I see. It used to be one man for every nine women I saw. And now it's much more like I'll see two men for every three women, so it's coming up to parity. There's a willingness to explore their own sense of self, what drives them and who they are.'
That's not to say that men never cried at football in years gone by. When this topic of conversation came up in the office, my colleague Amy Lawrence told a story about being in the away end at Anfield in 1989, when Michael Thomas scored a dramatic late goal to clinch the league title for Arsenal against Liverpool on the final day, and how she was nowhere near her friends when she eventually came up for air amid the chaotic celebrations that followed.
'I found myself next to a guy who looked like your absolute classic 1980s football hooligan,' she said. 'He was massive. He was a skinhead. He was covered in tattoos. He looked terrifying. But he had tears rolling down his cheeks and he was blubbing like a baby. I can still see his face today. It was beautiful because he was the last type of person that you would ever expect to break down emotionally at a match.'
The same can't be said for young Ricky Allman, who was only 11 years old when Leeds United were on their way to being relegated from the Premier League in 2004. With his shirt off and 'Leeds Til I Die' written across his chest, Allman was heartbroken as the television cameras homed in on him in the away end at Bolton Wanderers. Leeds were losing 4-1 and it was all too much for him.
'My bottom lip came out. A full-on, uncontrollable lip,' Allman told The Athletic in 2020.
His mother, Beverley, was watching at home. 'She rang me in tears, 'Are you alright?' she said. You've been on telly. They panned on the crowd and you were crying — I haven't stopped crying since.''
Plenty of Palace fans were saying the same thing for a week or more after beating Manchester City. In Kevin Day's case, the initial sense of shock eventually gave way to tears in, of all places, his local supermarket.
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'For the first minute (after the final whistle) I couldn't speak,' the writer, comedian and lifelong Palace fan says. 'Then I looked around me and I was the only one not in tears. It was incredible. Mates of mine who I've known for so long, stoic people, who normally wouldn't cry… they were just broken.
'I've never felt elation like it. My son came round at 9am the next morning. He's 29. He threw himself into my arms like he hasn't done since he was a five-year-old. He was sobbing.
'And then, Monday morning, I was in the Co-op buying a pint of milk and I just suddenly burst into tears. I just thought to myself, 'The last time I was in here we hadn't won the FA Cup'.'
Thinking about those who are no longer with us and unable to share a landmark moment can often trigger our emotions at football, as was almost certainly the case with the PSG coach Rafel Pol Cabanellas in Munich.
It could be the memories of a grandparent who introduced someone to a club in the first place or, for Day, of his late father, who was always at the end of the phone to discuss the Palace match afterwards.
'Everyone I spoke to on that Saturday evening had someone they wished they could have called,' he says. 'There must have been about three million Palace fans looking down from heaven.
'On a serious note, though, I do wonder whether all the posters put up in pubs in south London over the last five years, about how it's alright to talk, have actually had a positive impact and that this generation of men do think it's alright to show their emotions. Maybe that message is finally getting through.
'Or maybe it's just any group of men where something happens that they've waited 120 years for, finally happens. I don't know.
'But I'm starting to get goosebumps thinking about it all again now.'
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Manan Vatsyayana/AFP, Odd Andersen, Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)