Scientists reveal exactly what happens in football fans' brains when their team loses

Every time your football team scores, wins or loses, 'extreme' activity in your brain may dictate what you do next, a new study reveals. 

In experiments, scientists in Chile scanned football fans' brains to see how blood flow changed as they watched their team win or lose.

The experts found that the sight of their team scoring lit up the brain region associated with reward, releasing pleasurable chemicals like dopamine. 

But when their team lost, a different area of the brain involved in introspection was triggered, helping them make sense of what has just happened. 

In other words, we feel good when we watch our team score, but when we see our team's rivals put one past us, we attempt to rationalise it.

The study's lead author Francisco Zamorano Mendieta at Clínica Alemana de Santiago, said 'intense devotion affects neural activity'. 

'With significant victory, the reward circuitry in the brain is amplified relative to non-rival wins,' he said. 

'Most importantly, these very circuits are forged in early life.' 

The experts say the social and psychological behaviours of football fans have been commonly studied, but the sport's effects on the brain may have been overlooked. 

To learn more, they recruited 60 healthy males aged between 20 and 45 who were fans of two rival Chilean clubs – Colo-Colo and Club Universidad de Chile.

According to the experts, soccer fans are especially known for their team loyalty and enthusiasm in South America and Europe compared with the rest of the world, making them an ideal sample for extreme emotions and brain activity. 

The participants watched a compilation of highlights featuring 63 goals that involved their favourite team, their rival, or a neutral team.   

Participants saw their team achieving a high margin of victory against their arch rival as well as significant defeat against the rival – what pundits might call a 'thrashing'. 

As participants watched, researchers used functional MRI (fMRI), an imaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. 

The team also assessed their levels of football 'fanaticism' – including 'inclination to violence' and 'sense of belongingness' – by making them complete a 13-item personality questionnaire.

The fMRI results showed that brain activity changed dramatically 'within seconds' when the fan's team succeeded or failed. 

When a person's team wins, the reward system in the brain – responsible for creating feelings of pleasure and motivation – is activated. 

When scientists say a part of the brain is activated, it means that the nerve cells in that region are working harder and therefore need more blood flow, resulting in the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine and acetylcholine. 

Meanwhile, when a person's team loses, the 'mentalization network' – another set of coordinated brain regions – can be activated instead, according to Dr Zamorano. 

The mentalization network supports the ability to think about the mental states of oneself and of others, so activation of this network can therefore take the fan to an 'introspective state' that may lessen the pain from a loss.

Unsurprisingly, higher activation in the brain's reward system regions occurred when participants’ teams scored against rivals rather than non-rivals.

This suggests that the brain will reward a Liverpool fan, for example, with more pleasurable chemicals if they score against Everton or Manchester United compared with Sunderland or Luton Town.

Researchers found this effect is strongest in highly fanatic participants, who might seem perfectly rational individuals until dramatic moments make them 'suddenly flip'.

Most worryingly, the study found the mechanism that regulates cognitive control may be inhibited during a loss, which could be dangerous for people nearby. 

During a loss, there's inhibition of the brain hub connecting the limbic system (responsible for basic emotions like pleasure and anger) with frontal cortices (known for higher-level functions like decision-making, problem-solving and emotional regulation).

As a result, this may hamper the mechanism that regulates cognitive control, increasing the probability to fall into disruptive or violent behaviour.  

The findings, published today in the journal Radiology, may provide a useful model for studying social identity and emotional processing in competitive situations.

'Soccer fandom provides a high-ecological-validity model of fanaticism with quantifiable life consequences for health and collective behaviour,' Dr Mendieta said.

'The same neural signature – reward up, control down under rivalry – likely generalizes beyond sport to political and sectarian conflicts.'