It’s easy to be cynical about professional sports — especially the NFL. But despite the disturbing headlines the league earned this year, ranging from lax penalties for domestic violence to a growing awareness of the impact of traumatic brain injuries, there will always be at least one silver lining for professional football.
That would be the undisputed, research-supported evidence that there are very real mental health advantages to claiming a sports team as your own. Yes, there are studies that show blood pressure rises during games or testosterone plummets after a loss. But epic fandom is also linked to higher levels of well-being and general happiness with one’s social life, as well as lower levels of loneliness and alienation, according to research by sports psychology professor Daniel Wann of Murray State University.
Wann, author of the book Sport Fans: The Psychology And Social Impact Of Spectators, explains that there are two routes to feeling good through sports fandom.
“One would be following a successful team, and the second would simply be identifying with them,” Wann told The Huffington Post. “You can get these well-being benefits even if your team doesn’t do well; we’ve found this with historically unsuccessful teams as well,” he added.
–
Finally, being a fan of a sport provides some with a rare experience: success. Feeling victorious, even vicariously, is a precious emotion in troubled times, psychology professor Ronald F. Levant of the University of Akron told CantonRep.com.
“Identifying with your sports teams is one of the ways you can vicariously experience success, and in real life, success is hard,” Levant said in the 2010 article. “We have ups and downs, a lot of things don’t always go our way … especially in this economy.”
And for fans who love the sport enough to play it, that feeling of success is even more crucial. Pringle noted that in his town of Nottingham, hospital services are funding soccer leagues for young men with depression, schizophrenia or drug-related problems to play regularly scheduled matches.
“The interesting thing is that it is one area of their lives where they can experience real success,” Pringle wrote to HuffPost. “If you are going to be good at football you have usually developed real skill by around [age] 13 to 14, so lots of these guys struggle badly in many areas of their lives but can play really well, and for the time they are on that field they can engage in an activity [on] which their symptoms can, in many cases, have only a minimal impact.”
