Football Schadenfreude: The Case of Man City

The pleasure I feel from the potential demise of Manchester City feels chemical, not dissimilar to a party drug. It is a feeling that is very familiar; I also felt it deeply when I saw Manchester United captain Bruno Fernandes getting sent off against my team, Wolves, on Sky Sports on Boxing Day in 2024.

His clear distress-I'm sure he wasactuallycrying-was a little festive pleasure for all the family. On another occasion, I opted to watch a flailing Liverpool on a Sunday afternoon last season instead of a pre-arranged movie ( Frankenstein) with my wife.

I suspected, correctly, that Liverpool would get beaten as they were on a terrible run. I could picture my plastic Scouser of a brother sitting deflated and solemn in his Brighton flat surrounded by his fellow plastic Scousers, a cabal of Southerners who have probably been to Anfield fewer times than they have big toenails.

This is a brother I love and would do anything for in normal circumstances. Normally, his pain would open my heart, not send me sprinting up and down the kitchen muttering 'ha ha ha' and 'good', with an evil grin I would find clinically concerning on anyone else.

My wife got to spend the evening with a monster after all. For a moment, I felt ashamed of my reaction to the recent Man City scandal until I remembered how quickly and involuntarily football schadenfreude can arise.

While doing my book research, I was staggered by how many football fans have been put into brain scanners, or been attached to electrodes, in order to investigate their reactions to the suffering and misfortune of rival fans and teams. For example, in one study, fans were put in scanners and made towatchfellow fansbeing given painful electric shocks.

The empathy hubs of their brains lit up. Then they were shownrival fansbeing given electric shocks.

The empathy hubs weren't so interested. Worse still, the regions of their brains responsible for reward and pleasure lit up like floodlights.

I also spoke to the Ajax-supporting Dutch professor of psychology Wilco van Dijk about football schadenfreude-he is an expert-and he admitted that he has a grubby little secret. When Germany, the arch-rivals of the Dutch, are losing a game of football, he sometimes switches over to listen to the German commentary, just so he can experience the pain and misery in the voices of the pundits and commentators.