THAT'S MEN:Fans feel free to fully vent their passions, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
ONE NIGHT Prof Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University was in bed watching his beloved Sunderland on Match of the Day. At one stage his partner turned to him and complained about the thumping music coming from next door. He replied that he could hear nothing. On further investigation it turned out that what she was hearing was his heartbeat. That was the impact of watching Sunderland versus Birmingham on that night in 2009.
Right now, if you’re a fan of English football you may be suffering withdrawal symptoms. You can’t wait for the season to get going again and Mark Griffiths’s story shows just how much football means to you.
It is over a decade now since a study in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine by Phil Banyard of Nottingham Trent University and Mark Shevlin of the University of Ulster showed that having your team relegated to the championship brought extreme psychological stress of a level consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder to 11 per cent of football fans they studied.
More recently, the British Medical Journal published a study reporting a 25 per cent increase in heart attacks on June 30th, 1998, as measured by hospital admissions, compared to the same time the previous year and in following years. That was also the day England lost a penalty shootout to Argentina in the World Cup.
It all sounds terribly negative but what it really shows is how much football means to the people who support it passionately.
Indeed, for many men football provides one of the few contexts in which they can express emotions such as grief, joy or anger. Psychologists at the University of Surrey reported in 2004 that men felt they could only express these emotions when somebody died, when they were in a nightclub (though hopefully not all three at the same time in these two cases) and, you guessed it, at a football match.
When Dr Alan Pringle, who lectures in the School of Nursing at the University of Nottingham asked supporters of Mansfield Town to keep diaries of their emotional experiences before, during and after watching their team he found the whole experience amounted to “an emotional cleansing”, according to a paper in the Journal of The Royal Society for the Promotion of Health.
This is because watching a football match in a pub, on the terraces or in your living room allows you to do things you couldn’t ordinarily do. You can swear, shout, and make obscene gestures at the referee or at the supporters of the other team. You can even shed a tear. Where else, as they say, would you get it?
As Griffiths, writing about Pringle’s research, pointed out – it’s hard to prove that outbursts of this kind reduce aggression, for instance, but the football fans certainly felt better.
This is not new. Back in the days of the Byzantine Empire, the fans of various teams in chariot racing gave full vent to their passions, resulting in violence and murder. On one occasion, they turned on the Emperor Justinian for refusing to pardon two men who had murdered rival fans. Things got so bad that Justinian, according to some accounts, was about to flee when his wife Theodora, most definitely a lady not to be trifled with, made it clear that she expected him either to be emperor or to be dead. He got the supporters of one team on his side (a bag of gold helped) and sent the soldiers in to slaughter tens of thousands of the fans of the rival team.
Things don’t get that bad in football today, at least not yet, but sport is serious stuff and is connected into the most passionate of human emotions in ways that few other experiences can claim to be.
Roll on the new season.
For more on all of this, though not on the riots in Constantinople, see Griffiths's article at bit.ly/markgriffiths
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is available free by email