Are pre-match rituals more exciting than actual football games? Perhaps scientists ought to ask the fans | David Goldblatt

While heart-rate monitoring has provided us with some evidence, it fails to capture the ineffable nature of match dayA 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?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 Continue reading...