Are pre-match rituals more exciting than actual football games? Perhaps scientists ought to ask the fans
A recent study of Brazilian football fans, supporters of Atlético Mineiro, monitored their heart rates before and during a big match and concluded that, a single goal aside, the collective rituals of the day were more emotionally intense than anything else. So going to the football is about more than the football; but we surely knew that anyway? Does the kind of neurophysiological approach take us any further?
In the end this study relied on a very small sample – just 17 fans – and a very particular sample at that; the kind of supporter who shows up more than four hours before a game, and is all-in with the choreographed pre-match rituals of flares, fireworks and singing. Even then, the idea that heart rate is the most useful cipher for emotion is too crude a proposition to capture how we experience the game. This research was done at the final of the Minas Gerais state championships, against their eternal local rivals; I wonder what the results would have looked like from one of Bristol Rovers' tortuous late-season defeats this year? What is the physiological metric for ennui?
Viewed from a sociological or anthropological perspective, the idea that football fans would find the arrival of the team bus, marching to the stadium and the kick-off of the to game itself equally intense emotional experiences, and that these should exceed their level of excitement for most of their time actually watching the game, is hardly surprising. Football should be understood as simultaneously a collective ritual, a public theatre of identity and a long-running participatory soap opera, in which the game itself is just one element of the liturgy, the drama and the narrative, and in which the emotional weight of public gathering and collective chanting are equivalent to scoring a goal; and by the looks of the Brazilian research, the gathering and the chanting were more engaging than nearly all of the second half.
In any case, there is a lot more than just excitement going on. Watching football, and this is its genius, elicits an enormous diversity of emotions and psychological states; from boredom to despair, from empathy to anger. Heart rates and ECGs are all very well, but until we actually ask football fans what these moments mean, and set their own interpretations in a wider historical and cultural context, we aren't going to learn very much.
Neurophysiology can only take us so far: a similar study of Canadian ice hockey fans found that those with a deeper knowledge of the game found more moments more stressful than the average spectator as they could perceive threat and risk more acutely; but again, the question really is, why should this matter?
For more than a century now, watching and following professional football has been a place in which neighbourhood, urban, sub-national and national identities have been expressed and performed. They have been joined by markers of class, gender, ethnicity, religion and language. This has persisted despite the globalisation and commercialisation of the game, changes that have diluted the link between clubs and localities, and seen ever more ingenious ways deployed to control the behaviour of crowds, and to focus them on consumption rather than celebration. Indeed, if the attendance figures at English football, now at a historical high, are anything to go by, these links have intensified.
In an ever more individualised, atomised and deracinated world, football's collectivities, and its deeply communitarian cultures, are more valuable then ever with their promise, if not always the reality, of the safe, the secure, the known and the authentic. In an ever more mediated and digital world, and despite our addiction to our phones, it offers the chance to be in the moment, in the presence of others. In a world where the rate and scale of change has multiplied, at precisely the moment that politics has abandoned storytelling for bland technocracy or wild conspiracy theory, football generates comprehensible narratives.
And just occasionally, despite everything, it offers up moments of scintillating narrative drama, and of balletic and kinetic energy that are both beautiful and thrilling. Had the research been done at one of this year's Champions League semi-finals, a match of wildly gyrating fortunes that finished Internazionale 4 Barcelona 3 – and was as good and exciting a game as I have ever seen – we might be drawing very different conclusions.
David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives. His new book Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency (Mudlark) will be published in August
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