Why Do I Care So Much About the World Cup?

by Suzie Booth, Counsellor/Psychotherapist, MSC. MBACP (Accred.)

I am not someone who spends every weekend watching football. I don’t follow every result, and although I have an interest, I don't understand every tactical decision or have particularly strong opinions about which players should be selected.

And yet, when the World Cup comes around, I care. Like really care.

I feel nervous before England matches. I become invested in players I barely think about for the rest of the 4 years (well, 2, until the Euro's come around). I imagine how incredible it would feel if we actually won.

When the match begins, it matters. I am stressed and on the edge of my seat the whole game.

Logically, of course, I know that I am sitting in my own home watching a group of people I have never met kick a ball around a pitch thousands of miles away. Whether we win or lose, it won’t change my actual life.

The washing will still need putting away. The children will still wake up early. Work will still be waiting for me the next day.

So why can a football match make us feel anxious, hopeful, elated or completely devastated?

Why do we say “we won” when we didn’t actually play?

Why the hell does it matter so much?

We want to belong

Human beings have a deep need to feel part of something. We look for groups, communities and shared identities that tell us: these are my people, this is where I belong.

Supporting a football team gives us an immediate tribe.

During an international tournament, that tribe becomes unusually large; people who may have very different lives, values, backgrounds and beliefs are suddenly wearing the same colours, singing the same songs and hoping for the same outcome. And generally there is no opposition, no conflict in your environment, because for once, everyone is on the same team.

For a little while, many of the things that usually separate us seem less important. Research into sports fandom suggests that supporting a team can become part of our social identity. We do not simply watch the group from the outside, we experience ourselves as belonging to it. That is one reason the language naturally becomes “we” rather than “they.”

It might sound irrational, but belonging is not a trivial human need. Feeling connected to other people can be grounding; it can make us feel less alone. We are not only watching football, we are experiencing what it feels like to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

The team becomes part of us

The closer we identify with a team, the more personally we can experience what happens to it. A win feels like our win, the players' elation is our elation, criticism of the team feels personal and a loss leaves us flat long after the final whistle.

It's why people who have contributed absolutely nothing to the performance can feel proud, and why someone sitting on their sofa can feel genuinely wounded by a missed penalty.

Psychologically, the boundaries between the team and the self begin to blur. Research on fan identity tell us how incredibly deeply connected supporters, can experience the team as an extension of themselves, meaning that its successes and failures affect their own emotions and sense of identity.

We see similar things in many other areas of life. We become attached to our families, workplaces, communities, political groups and even the schools our children attend. Their achievements can make us proud, while their rejection or failure can feel like a reflection on us.

The World Cup offers a very visible example of something very human; we become emotionally invested in the things which we identify with.

It gives us permission to feel

Everyday adult life requires a great deal of emotional restraint - we hold ourselves together at work, keep functioning when we're overwhelmed, remain relatively composed while doing the school run, answering emails, making dinner and dealing with all the practical demands of everyday life.

A lot of people (particularly men) have also grown up with messages that certain emotions should be contained. They hear...

Don’t cry

Don’t be too sensitive

Don’t make a fuss

Then football begins, and suddenly there is permission to feel everything AND to show everything.

People shout, leap from their seats, cover their faces, hug each other and cry openly. They experience fear, anger, joy, disappointment, hope and relief, sometimes within the space of a few minutes. The emotion is not private or embarrassing - it's shared.

When thousands of people gasp at the same moment, or millions celebrate the same goal, there is something powerful about knowing that other people are feeling what we are feeling. We are not just observing the emotion, we are experiencing it together.

It allows us to hope

Hope can be really scary. When we allow ourselves to really want something, we also make ourselves vulnerable to disappointment. That's why people often protect themselves with pessimism (I am so guilty of this)...

"I've got a bad feeling about this"

“We’ll never win”

“We always mess it up”

“There’s no point getting excited”

Those words are not really predictions, they're emotional armour. If we convince ourselves that we don't expect anything, it'll hurt less if it goes wrong.

But beneath the cynicism, hope remains.

Maybe this time will be different.

Maybe the impossible thing might happen.

Maybe finally the story will have the ending we want.

The tension of football comes largely from its uncertainty; we know the outcome matters to us, but we can't control a single part of it. We can kid ourselves by wearing the shirt, choosing where we sit, repeating made up rituals and shouting our pointless advice at the TV, but ultimately, we are powerless.

It's a concentrated version of an experience we come across repeatedly in life; caring deeply about something we can't guarantee.

It connects us to our memories

The emotion attached to football is never only about the match happening right now. A tournament connects us to previous versions of ourselves. We remember watching with our parents when we were children, we remember crowded pubs, summer evenings, familiar songs and the disappointment of previous defeats. For me, I remember dancing around the living room like crazy to 3 Lions.

For some people, football is woven into their relationship with a parent or grandparent. It might have been one of the places where affection, conversation and closeness came easily.

The rituals matter.

The same shirt. The same seat. The same food. The same people gathered around the TV.

It gives us a shared story

So much of modern life is fragmented and solitary; we watch different programmes, follow different people, work different hours and live increasingly separate lives. Even within the same household, everyone can be looking at a different screen.

Major sporting events interrupt that separateness.

For a short period, people are watching the same thing at the same time. We are having a shared conversation, a shared source of tension, it's a shared memory in the making.

You can walk into work, stand at the school gate or speak to someone in a shop and know that there is a good chance they saw what you saw.

That collective experience has become increasingly rare.

Now obviously the World Cup doesn't matter to everyone. Some people are completely indifferent to it, others experience the pressure to care as irritating or excluding.

But for those of us who do become completely invested, the football offers more than entertainment...

It offers belonging

Identity

An emotional release

Shared memories and a reason to get together

And it gives us permission to hope for an ending we know we might never actually get.

It was never just football

When we become deeply emotional about a match, it can look disproportionate from the outside. It really is only a game. But human emotions are rarely only about the thing directly in front of us.

We respond through our histories, our relationships, our identities and our need to feel connected.

That does not mean every reaction to football is healthy; we know the domestic violence rates increase whether the team wins or loses. And group identity can become hostile, aggressive or excluding when loyalty to 'us' turns into hatred of 'them'.

But the intensity of sports fandom tells us something valuable...

We need places where we can belong

We need shared experiences

We need stories that offer suspense, possibility and hope

We need moments when it feels acceptable to stop being composed and simply feel what we feel.

So yes, logically, it is a group of people kicking a ball around a pitch.

But emotionally, it represents identity, family, memory, connection, vulnerability and hope.

THAT is why we care so much.