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PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Sport Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1517295
The People's Game: evolutionary perspectives on the behavioural neuroscience of football fandom
Provisionally accepted- 1 Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
- 2 Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland
- 3 Retired consultant psychiatrist, London, United Kingdom
- 4 University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Association football (soccer) is the world’s most popular sport. Transculturally, fans invest significant resources following their teams, suggesting underlying psychological universals with evolutionary origins. Although evolutionary science can help illuminate the ultimate causes of human behaviour, there have been limited modern evolutionary perspectives on football fandom. In this paper, we consider evolutionary perspectives on football fandom from a behavioural neuroscientific standpoint. We discuss how the appeal of football may arise through the low-scoring and highly variable outcomes of games; we relate this to the neuroscience of reward prediction errors and motivation. We highlight recent research on the psychobiological responses to ritual, including endorphin release, which may reduce anxiety and facilitate group bonding. We discuss the prosocial and anxiety-sublimating effects of the matchday ritual and argue that football may be a special case whereby ritual behaviour does have a small effect on the outcome of interest. We discuss the psychology of ingroup and outgroup effects of fandom and argue that, although resource scarcity can sometimes lead to aggression, that larger inter-group effects can be positive. We comment on the socioemotional developmental aspects of football fandom, and note how group identification may lead to displays of sacrifice. We finish with a discussion of whether, in the era of social prescribing, football could be seen as a psychiatrist’s tool. We conclude with suggestions on how the positive aspects of football can be emphasised through evolutionary perspectives, and how future research on football fandom may inform evolutionary understanding of humans writ large.
Keywords: evolution, Psychiatry, Football, Soccer, Sports fan behavior
Received: 28 Oct 2024; Accepted: 13 Dec 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Butler, Brar, Abed and O'connell. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Matt Butler, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
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