Short Wave - Why Emotions Run High For Sports Fans

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

We are in the thick of multiple sports seasons: the NBA finals are happening, and baseball and soccer are in full swing. For devoted fans, emotions can run pretty high during a game. Cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas has long been fascinated by that intensity — and how uniform it can be across fans. So, he and fellow researchers at the University of Connecticut decided to look into what exactly makes fans so deeply connected to their team and to fellow supporters. It turns out that connection may have less to do with actual gameplay and more to do with rituals. Their research was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Questions about sports science? Email us at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Shortwavers, we are deep into one of the best seasons of the year, in my opinion. Baseball season. Every year, I love to root for my San Diego Padres, though to be honest, I don't spend a lot of time watching the players when I go to a game. It's all about my routines around the game. And I'm not the only one. I'm Dimitris Xigalatas. Demetrius, or Professor X, as his students call him, is a University of Connecticut cognitive

anthropologist. He's a lifelong fan of football or soccer, as we call it in the States. I vividly remember the first time I went to the sports stadium in Greece. I was in 1985. My team, or what was later to become my team, because of that experience, was on its way to winning a title. And the stadium looked like a ball of fire. Everybody was like fliers and jumping up and down. And I remember I was too small to see what was happening in the pitch. My father kept lifting. me up. And it was that experience that ritualized chanting and jumping up and down among the fans

that really turned me into a fan. And through the repetition of that experience, week after week, year after year, that's how you become a fan. All that repetition turns into rituals. These sometimes little but still important, repeated behaviors. Like how

growing up my dad would take me to Padre Games every summer. We would eat hot dogs and popcorn and I'd watch him filling in the scorecard. And as Demetri wrote in his book Ritual a few years ago, these repeated communal actions can really bring out an intense spectrum of highs and lows.

I've seen how sports led people to do extraordinary fits of cooperation. I've stayed in someone's house in Germany when I was traveling as a college student because he saw my scarf. On the other hand, I've seen the dark side of that. And in fact, I almost got murdered once again for wearing that same scarf in the streets of Athens.

I got attacked by a gang just because I was wearing the wrong insignia. I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't provoke anyone. I found myself on the floor being beaten by four men. And I got lucky because there was another group of fans this time wearing the right insignia who came to my rescue. This personal passion has shaped Demetrius's career. He went on to study all the ways people engage in rituals, including recently how they come up in sports.

He and his research team found that the fans who are the most emotionally invested in a basketball game were the ones watching in the stands. And most recently, Dmitri studied a crowd in Brazil during an annual event called Street of Fire, where fans welcomed their football team to the stadium with flares and fireworks. And they found something shocking. The emotional highs of the fans mostly didn't happen during the game. So today on the show, sports rituals. What they tell us about human behavior and how being a number one, fan can be a source of unity and at the same time, a seed of intense division.

I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. So Demetrius, what inspired you to start looking into sports rituals or like really any rituals? So I was reading reports about sociologists, like there's a French sociologist called the Dirkheim, who mentions this feeling he calls collective effervescence. The best way you describe it for me is that if you've ever been part of a massive crowd, this could be a football stadium or a rock concert or a religious ceremony, and you feel goosebumps at the back of your neck when you're chanting with thousands of individuals, that's what he had in mind. He called this collective effervescence. And this resonated effervescence because the crowd is bubbling up.

And this description really resonated with what people performing those rituals would tell me. They would say things like when we go up there and we enact this collective ceremony, we all feel like one. Some of them specifically said our hearts beat as one during those ceremonies. There are thousands of us, but we feel like one. And I started thinking, okay, how can we measure this feeling of oneness, this emotional alignment? And to study this, you and your team measured how, like, emotionally aligned people were when they were attending a basketball game. So how did you do that? Yes.

So we're looking at how similar their heart rate. are at any given time point. So if my harder is 75 and yours is 80, and we define that range as five beats per minute, we're within that range now. And maybe the next second, we're not. And maybe the second after that, we are again. Yeah, and to measure that you and your team

used electrodes under people's shirts, and they also had accelerometers attached to them, so you could not only monitor these fans' heartbeats, but you could actually, like, see how they were moving and breathing. Like, tell me more about that process. So for every game or most games, we had about 20 people wearing those devices. And we put those devices on not just with groups of people watching the game in the stadium, but also with groups of people watching the game live on television.

And of course, fans do react to get very emotional when watching their team play on television, but they'll all tell you that it's not the same as being in the stadium. And that's exactly what we find there. In fact, we analyzed the structure of these games for anything we could think of, how fast the games were, how big the lead was, you name it. And we found that the most important predictor of that group synchrony is whether people are physically located in the stadium or watching the game on television. So it's not about what's happening in the pits.

It's about what's happening in the terraces. So all of this led you most recently to go down to Brazil and study your favorite sport football or soccer, as it's known in the U.S. And it sounds like you... Let's agree to call it real football. We're going to do that for the rest of the episode. We're going to call football. But, you know, for our listeners, it sounds like you found, like, that the height of a fan's

experience was not actually during the game. When was their, like, most... Like you said, arouse, excitement, synchrony. When did that happen for these Brazilian football fans? Yes, so now in Brazil, we're looking at what happens within a cup final and we're giving these devices to members of a fan club to wear not just during the game but a few hours before. So as they engage in this pre-game ritual that involves the fans lining up on a big avenue,

waiting for the team's bus carrying the players to cross that avenue. And as it approaches, they start lighting flare and chanting and jumping up and down. There's a lot of emotion. There's a lot of excitement. And the stated goal of this ritual is to animate the players and give them psychological boost

and also animate the fans themselves. So we wanted to see whether this pre-game ritual, whether this would create the same kind of emotional alignment as the game itself. And what we found is that not only does it match that level of alignment, it actually exceeds it. In fact, the only part of the game that created that level of emotional arousal, the same as the pregame ritual, was when the home team scores a goal. And that is the goal that almost gave them the cup.

Wow. And so people were more aligned that, you know, their hearts were beating as one. They were like euphoric during this ritual more so than actually just watching the game. Yes. And in fact, we even had a monitor on the bus driver. who was carrying the delegation. Somebody is seated and who's not jumping up and down,

who's not living any flares. And we find that he's basically at the group average. He's just as much emotional excitement at any given moment as the average fan. Wow, that's really cool. Okay, so this new analysis really helped you look at like really fine detail

of what was like affecting these people's synchronicity. And it made me think about like how different fandoms are like around the world. So like in your opinion, what's the difference between like U.S.-based and international sports fandom? That's an excellent question because all of us who are, come from outside of the United States and our fans, that we see a major difference in how fandom operates. They tend to be structurally different. And what I mean by this is that in the U.S., you have so many interruptions. Sometimes I feel that I don't even want to finish watching a game in the United States because I just forget who's playing between all of the timeouts and the shows and the

interviews and the commercials. In Europe, it's very different. And it's particularly different in the context of football, where you have the only major sport that has 45 minutes of uninterrupted action. And in our data, we're beginning to be able to say something about this. So when you look at what happens at football, you have this sustained emotional alignment between fans. But in our basketball data, we see that as emotional alignment begins to rise, then you have the first time out, and it drops. And then it rises again, and then you have cheerleaders or something else, and then it drops again. Yeah. So these interruptions prevent the fans from engaging in those long, ritualized interactions that at the end of the day are what creates that sense of loyalty

and fan-ship. Yeah. So we're missing out on that unity, but we're also missing out on the beating each other up. That is true. There are two sides to this coin. And of course, every sports organization, every club is going to want to think very carefully about striking a balance, finding that Goldilocks zone between having brand loyalty and having fans that care deeply about the team and have to buy season tickets.

Yeah. And having loyalty that is too strong, on the other hand, and spills over into violence. It's not an easy balance to strike. Yeah. But that's the ideal. So your book is about, like, creating meaning. So what does this all mean to you about creating meaning?

How we create as humans create meaning. When we ask ourselves what it is that makes us human, we can talk about tool use and toolmaking and bipedalism or this or that. But if you think about it, if you start asking people, and as an anthropologist, I do that all the time. what makes for a good life rather than just a survival. They tend to point to those kinds of things like art, things like religion, things like ritual,

things like group affiliation, group identity, sports, all of those manifestations of culture, that when you look at them at first glance, they seem to be utterly pointless. But at the end of the day, the answer to this is that we care because we're humans. So what characterizes us as humans, in my opinion, is our propensity, our ability, and in fact our deep-seated need to create meaning from things that seem to be intrinsically meaningless. Demetrius, thank you so much for talking to me about sports fandom.

It's made me think about my obsessions a little bit differently. My pleasure. Thank you. If you liked this episode, follow us on the NPR app or your podcast. podcasting platform of choice. You'll infuse cool science into your day. Plus, it really helps our show. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by a showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.