5:58am.
It was dark outside, the house was quiet, and I had somehow managed to wake up two minutes before my alarm.
A 3pm start in India meant an early wake up time for me. I figured that a 6am alarm would allow me to catch the last hour of the game, a fair compromise for someone that enjoys sleeping.
I tapped the Sling app on my iPhone and rubbed my groggy eyes. The game was reaching its crescendo, and my team, the Punjab Kings, needed a (very) ambitious last minute push to secure victory. For about 72 seconds, I put the phone away, convincing myself that the game was gone and I was better off catching up on sleep.
But the heart wants what it wants. My brain joins in the fun, too: it’s dumb enough to remind me of all the improbable comebacks that the great game has seen. My slumber stands no chance, and the iPhone comes out again, remaining glued to my face till the end of the game.
It wouldn’t be enough. An hour later, with the sun now shining bright, my favorite cricket team would be knocked out of contention from the IPL playoffs. I’d go back to bed while the rest of San Francisco would wake up.
It all felt like a bad dream. But did I really have anyone else to blame?
We’d lost our last six games, now. Hell, this wasn’t about just six games: twenty years of mediocre performance, seventeen without a single playoff appearance, and yet, each season I would participate in the emotional slot machine of watching my kings compete.
When my sports team wins, I feel like a winner. The team is an extension of me, and victory provides bragging rights. When they lose, I feel like shit. My shoulders slump. This despite not having moved my ass the entirety of the game (sometimes out of superstition, most times out of laziness). Their mistakes are my mistakes.
How ridiculous is that? I have no control over the outcome of this game. The millionaire superstars don’t know I exist. I have no way to affect what’s going to happen. And yet, just like clockwork, I let the result of a weekly game dictate my mood for at least a day. Maybe more.
It’s me. This is a me problem. But it’s also not, because I’m not the only one who suffers from this disease.
In 2011, a research study analyzed Major League Baseball fans’ willingness to perform a series of unusual behaviors if the acts would guarantee their team a World Series title. The researchers found that many people were willing to consider engaging in truly bizarre acts for the good of their team:
If I want to maximize happiness, I should pick a sports team that wins. A lot. Why subject myself to an emotional slot machine when I can pick a team that gets me better odds?
There are a few problems with this approach. One of them is that it assumes you get to pick.
Most of the time, your team picks you. The wand chooses the wizard, and if you happen to be born into a family that supports Tottenham Hotspurs, good luck picking Arsenal.
But let’s assume that you actually can pick your sports team.
Well, for one, it’s quite hard to pick a team that guarantees winning, season after season. If sport was that predictable, none of us would watch it.
Second, a team’s competency is just one of its attributes. My coworker, Ben, told me that when he picked the Tottenham Hotspurs 10 years ago, he purposefully picked a team that was good but not great, because picking a team that was already great would mean selling out. Now, at the time of writing this in 2026, they’re on the verge of relegation, and Ben is currently in Italy eating gelato. The story of Tottenham Hotspurs is proof that terrible things can happen to great people, like Ben.
Others have even picked teams because they simply liked its color:
When you pick a team that’s unpredictable, you might cherish the wins more.
This raises a question: are sports fans of teams that win a lot actually happier, or is supporting the underdog going to make you more happy?
Research shows that soccer fans are about twice as unhappy when their team loses as they are when their team wins. So, given any soccer match between two teams that doesn’t end in a draw, and assuming a roughly equal number of fans on each side, the net result of that game will be a destruction of happiness.
But there is also research that shows that people get more joy out of unexpected successes than expected ones. So our expectations seem to play a part in the amount of happiness that we derive from a game. I’m not sure if the above research paper takes that into account.
Specifically, research shows us that if we took the expected value of an underdog win (i.e. the odds of the win times the amount of pleasure that someone would get from that win), it will always be higher than the expected value of a bet on the favorite. And so it might even make more sense to root for the team that’s more likely to lose.
Here’s the problem: I always have expectations. The Punjab Kings play in the Indian Premier League, an annual 8 week cricket league that is designed to make “underdogs” more credible through an annual player auction, salary caps, and a short season where variance is high. In other words, even though season to season my team hasn’t played well, they technically start each season on a (more or less) even footing.
And say, even if they’ve lost their previous six games, my brain will actually convince me that the law of averages must be around the corner. The win must be imminent.
As a result, I play the emotional slot machine. Millions of others do every single day, too, waiting for the dopamine hit that watching sports can provide.
Arsenal won the English Premier League after twenty years this week. And boy did their fans cash in – here’s a glimpse at their subreddit:
Those gunners hit it big. I’m talking staying in your bed for the whole day just scrolling the internet absorbing the praise and the adulation of winning the most prestigious cup in world soccer big. Now that is what I’m talking about.
Putting aside some of my reddit fuelled ramblings aside, there is actual research that shows that being a fan of a sports team can help meet many psychological needs that are important in your life, like the need to belong. One line that stood out to me from the research paper was the below:
“From the perspective of sport fandom, this involves using the pastime to gain a sense of purpose and to feel connected to something greater than themselves.”
Being a super fan can help give your life purpose. But in my experience, purpose is a dangerous word to mix with sports consumption.
Your sports team giving you purpose
I follow my sports teams much more closely when I lack purpose in other areas of my life.
If I’m unhappy at work or not making progress on side projects, I derive my sense of accomplishment from how well my sports team is doing, because it’s missing from the primary pursuits in my life.
I will bet my emotional wellbeing on the result of a game, rather than on the inputs that I take towards my goals, because it’s easier to get my sports team to put in the work it takes to win, rather than for me to do so in my own life.
There are practical implications for this, like having less time to watch sports games when I’m occupied with more productive stuff, but more so it’s the fact that my brain just has less bandwidth to pay attention to the enticing proposition of following a sports team that closely.
And yet, I don’t want to forget the immeasurable amount of joy that sports has given to my life and the lessons that it’s taught me. It’s one of the ways that I bond and keep in touch with my dad, who introduced me to the sport of cricket. It’s how I’ve forged some of my best friendships, especially with strangers who I might have spotted wearing a team’s jersey. It’s how I’ve gotten to travel the world and had an incredible time morphed into something bigger, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of fans that also love this game.
The point that I’m trying to make is that supporting my favorite sports team is not a small part of my life. It’s a meaningful aspect that has the ability to regulate my mood. It has the ability to make me cry, both because of immense sadness and because of immense joy.
I’m not the only one to play this slot machine. This casino has millions of others in it, hoping for it to land on red.