Researchers scanned football fans’ brains to see what happens when their favourite team wins or loses. Here’s what they found.
Have you ever seen a football fan go absolutely mad when their team wins or loses a big match?
Oftentimes they’ll tell you it’s out of their control, that their love for the beautiful game takes over, making them act irrationally.
While it may sound unlikely that grown adults could be driven to madness by a sport that even children can play, a new neurological study just may back them up – to an extent.
The study, published on Tuesday in the journal Radiology, found that distinct areas of the brain are activated when football fans watch their team perform, triggering both positive and negative emotions and behaviours.
Chilean university researchers used functional MRI – a technique that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow – to study 60 male football fans in Chile.
Classifying the fans as spectators, fans, or fanatics depending on the intensity of their passion for the sport, the researchers looked at their brain activity while watching goal sequences from matches that involved their favourite team, a rival team, or a neutral team.
Fanaticism was quantified using the Football Supporters Fanaticism Scale, which is based on 13 items including “inclination to violence” and “sense of belongingness”.
Those considered “fanatic” were seen as having an “extreme identification” with their team, meaning their team’s success significantly affected their own personal identity.
Winning is like a drug, losing can suppress self-control
The fMRIs revealed that when a fan’s favourite team scored against its rivals, it activated regions of the reward system of their brain, which are typically associated with food, sex, and addictive drugs.
Meanwhile, when a fan’s team suffered significant defeat at the hands of a rival, it activated the mentalising network of the brain, which is involved in perception, and reduced activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), a region of the brain that’s involved in monitoring conflict and emotional control.
“Rivalry rapidly reconfigures the brain’s valuation-control balance within seconds,” said lead author Francisco Zamorano, an associate professor at the Universidad San Sebastián in Santiago, Chile.
This means the reward system regions go into overdrive when participants’ teams score against rivals, compared with the same performance against non-rivals.
Zamorano noted that the effect is strongest in highly fanatic people. They may find it harder to regulate their emotions when their identity is threatened, which could help explain why otherwise rational people can seem like entirely different people during matches.
These brain mechanisms aren’t just limited to football fanaticism, researchers say. They’re also reproduced when it comes to other types of fanaticism, from religion to politics.
Zamorano gave the example of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, which he said shows how political fanaticism can overpower democratic norms when a group with a shared identity gets large enough.
“The participants showed classic signs of compromised cognitive control, exactly what our study found in the reduced dACC activation,” Zamorano said.
The good news is that many of our brain circuits are forged in early life, which means there are ways to prevent these reactions from leading to irreversible harm in adulthood.
“Caregiving quality, stress exposure, and social learning sculpt the valuation-control balance that later makes individuals vulnerable to fanatic appeals,” Zamorano said.
“Therefore, protecting childhood is the most powerful prevention strategy”.