11 hours ago
Football fans prefer pre-match beers to the game
Having a pint or a burger before watching a football match is a ritual for fans.
Now a study has found that supporters enjoy pre-game activities more than the match itself.
Data from heart rate monitors worn by 17 Brazilian football fans who attended a cup final revealed that the level of collective excitement was higher before the game than during it.
The 'Rua de Fogo' ritual of these fans involves meeting up hours before the match to chant and set off flares while greeting the team bus carrying the players to the ground.
This was the most collective excitement the group of study participants felt all day, with the exception of a brief spike when their team scored.
But the overall joy of the group, known as collective effervescence, from the pre-game ceremonies exceeded the average excitement of the 90 minutes of football, the data showed.
'What we see is that, in fact, the pre-game ritual generates more emotional synchrony than the game itself,' said Dr Dimitris Xygalata, the study author and an avid football fan working at the University of Connecticut.
'There's a single moment in the entire game when they have more collective emotional synchrony than the pre-game ritual, and that's when they scored a goal.
'Rituals are the kinds of things that, at first glance, don't make any sense in terms of human behaviour, but are deeply meaningful to people.'
Ritualised interactions
Football is unique among ritualistic behaviours as it elicits strong emotions in people – enough to make grown men cry – while being largely independent of politics or religion.
Dr Xygalata added: 'Sports generate billions and billions of dollars globally, and they take up so much of people's attention. And the reason they do that is not just because of what's happening on the pitch. It's because of these ritualised interactions that occur among the fans.'
The study is published in PNAS and adds to previous research on Brazilian football fans during the 2014 World Cup, which found the extent of physical distress when Brazil lost 7-1 in the semi-final could increase their chance of heart problems.
The emotions of fans during the infamous defeat led to physical problems that increased the risk of high blood pressure and strain on the heart. Scientists analysed saliva samples before, during and after games.
And it comes after Telegraph Sport tested the impact on our vital signs that the stresses and strains that watching England's team in Euro 2024 put us through.
A recent study by the University of Waterloo, in Canada, studied ice hockey supporters and saw that die-hard fans activated a region of the brain in key moments which remained dormant in casual watchers who were less interested.
This study found in 20 people who had their brain activity monitored that in moments where deep sport-specific knowledge was needed to grasp the context, the die-hard fans were more engaged and subjected to more stress than less knowledgeable people.
