It’s not the game, it’s the group: Sports fans connect the most over rituals

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

University of Connecticut professor of anthropology Dimitris Xygalatas is a scientist and self-declared rational thinker. But he’s also a lifelong soccer fan, and he fully admits that when his Greek home team finally won their league in 2019, he cried tears of joy.

“Not what you might call a rational organism’s behavior,” he jokes.

But his reaction is in keeping with his latest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which shows that the intense feelings of joy, unity, and excitement that fans experience surrounding sports can be less about the game and more about the ritual of coming together.

With the cooperation of a die-hard Brazilian soccer (actually, it’s “football,” Xygalatas grudgingly reminds us Americans) fan club, Xygalatas and his team tracked the physiological arousal of fans before, during, and after a state championship final in Minas Gerais between local rival teams.

Using wearable heart monitors, they measured the emotional reactions of fans during the ritual of Rua de Fogo (Street of Fire), during which crowds gather near the stadium to welcome the team’s bus. As it arrives, fans light flares, smoke bombs, and fireworks, wave flags, and chant to boost team morale and unify supporters.

The scientists outfitted participants with EKG monitors hidden beneath their clothing. The devices measured heart rate fluctuations, which is a proxy for emotional arousal, as fans participated in the pre-game celebration, entered the stadium, and watched the match unfold.

What they found was striking: The levels of shared excitement, or what the scientists call “collective effervescence,” peaked not during the game, but during the pre-game fan rituals.

Only when the home team scored a goal did those physiological markers exceed the emotional high of the pre-match gathering.

“What we see is that, in fact, the pre-game ritual generates more emotional synchrony than the game itself,” Xygalatas says. “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.”

The findings underscore Xygalatas’s broader work to understand how ritual shapes human behavior and identity.

“Rituals are the kinds of things that, at first glance, don’t make any sense in terms of human behavior, but are deeply meaningful to people,” he says.

Xygalatas’s past research has taken him to remote firewalking ceremonies and intense religious festivals. But soccer, he says, offers a unique laboratory: It’s a global obsession that’s rich in ritual and pageantry, but largely free from political or religious ideology.

The physiological data from his latest research showed that this ritualistic gathering—something that occurred before a single ball was kicked—produced sustained arousal levels comparable to the game itself.

“People attribute a lot of meaning to sports,” Xygalatas says. “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 ritualized interactions that occur among the fans.”

The implications, the paper argues, extend beyond sports. Ritualized group behaviors like concerts, religious ceremonies, or political rallies may powerfully shape people’s emotions and even their beliefs.

“By going to these events, we’re actually shaping our beliefs,” he says. “So sports is not just an excuse for people to get together. It’s a driver of identity.”

Xygalatas speaks from experience. As a young man growing up in Thessaloniki, Greece, he was a member of a soccer fan club. One day, while wearing his team’s scarf in the wrong neighborhood, he was ambushed by four men and brutally attacked, an incident that echoes the fatal beating of a 19-year-old in his hometown years later, also over team allegiance.

“I felt a blow to my head from behind, and next thing I knew, there were four men beating me, kicking me on the head, everywhere,” remembers Xygalatas. “The reason I was able to escape is that another group of men was turning the corner, wearing my insignia, so they chased them away.”

Football, he says, is the only sport that regularly leads to deadly violence, a fact that leagues and governing bodies like FIFA should take seriously.

He says it’s in soccer clubs’ best interest to strike a balance between building loyalty, which Europeans and South Americans are excellent at doing, and making it safe for people to participate in.

Still, Xygalatas is clear that he’s not advocating for less passion. He hopes his work helps people understand why they care so deeply in the first place.

“If we look at what makes us human, we realize that it’s our ability and our need to derive meaning from things that seem meaningless,” he says.