Header image by Jacob Pryce, ASC Communications
When 52,000 people filled BC Place to watch Canada’s men’s soccer team face Qatar, strangers embraced and high-fived, the roar of the crowd grew louder with every goal, and people who had never particularly followed the sport found themselves on their feet screaming, cheering, and swept up in the excitement.
That intense, communal, and often difficult-to-explain feeling happens at every major sporting event and extends well beyond sport—from Swifties singing in unison at a concert to protestors marching shoulder to shoulder.
What drives these emotional experiences in large crowds, and why do sporting outcomes feel so personal to those watching from the stands?
We spoke with three UBC Arts researchers to understand the forces behind fandom and the emotions that come with being a supporter. They argue that the answer has less to do with sport itself and more to do with how humans build identity, attachment, and belonging through shared experience.
How a team becomes your team
Dr. Neil Armitage, a UBC sociologist who researched football spectatorship in his postgraduate studies, argues that fandom begins earlier than most people realize and less consciously than they might think. Many lifelong fans do not initially fall in love with the sport itself, but with the experience surrounding it. “As a child, you’re not going to a stadium alone,” he explains. “You’re going with a parent or someone close to you, and there’s already an emotional connection there. That bond then becomes associated with the experience of the game.”
As children are gradually introduced to the crowd, Armitage explains, it can begin to take on some of the characteristics of what sociologists call a primary group—the close-knit groups, like family and peers, through which we first form our sense of who we are. Because this happens during childhood, the attachment forms at a foundational level. “That’s where the ‘we’ comes from,” he says. “There’s no separation between you and the team, because you are the team, and the team is you.”
Dr. Jessica Tracy, a UBC professor of psychology whose research focuses on self-conscious emotions like pride and shame, explains what that attachment looks like psychologically: “As humans, we tie our sense of self to much larger entities,” she says. “There’s what we call a collective self, which is your identity at a much broader level. One of the groups that become really easily tied up in people’s sense of collective self are teams that represent communities such as your university, state, or country.”
The rituals of fandom
Once fandom takes hold, it is the rituals that reinforce it, and sport offers plenty of them. Armitage argues that rituals are the mechanism through which fan identity gets reinforced over time and that they’re learned, not instinctive. “It’s not something you just pick up; it’s something you learn, something you become part of,” he says. The jerseys, chants, pre-match routines, familiar songs, and recurring traditions all help transform fandom from a casual interest into something deeper.
Just as importantly, these rituals connect people to one another. Over time, fans begin to recognize the same people in the stands — people they see every week, whose names they may not know, and with whom conversation rarely strays beyond the latest signing, injury, or result. “You don’t meet them for drinks, you don’t see them anywhere else,” Armitage says. “They’re not friends in the conventional sense, but their presence matters, and over time, these familiar faces become part of the ritual itself.”
Supporters make their way to BC Place ahead of Canada's match against Qatar. Shared rituals—from wearing team colours to singing anthems and gathering before kickoff—help reinforce fan identity and belonging. Photo: Alycia S, ASC Communications
“There's no separation between you and the team, because you are the team, and the team is you.”
Once a fan, always a fan?
That sense of fan identity tends to be long-lasting. Dr. Friedrich Götz, a UBC personality psychologist who has spent years studying how fans experience major tournaments including two FIFA World Cups, recognizes this pull in his own life. A lifelong soccer fan who grew up in Germany, his connection to the sport has faded with physical distance and time, but the World Cup arriving on his doorstep has pulled something back. “It’s easy to reconnect to that former version of myself and get swept away by the fun of it all,” he says.
Tracy’s research suggests why. “If part of your identity is ‘I am a Canucks fan,’ that is part of your identity even when it’s not hockey season,” she says. “It’s maybe a little dormant, but it’s still there—just like a parent is a parent no matter what, even when their kids have grown up and moved away.”
The emotional cost of caring
But what about when a team is struggling? When losses pile up, does that attachment start to fade?
Research would suggest it should. Götz points to the work of the late Nobel laureate and former UBC professor Dr. Daniel Kahneman, who argued that humans are generally more sensitive to losses than gains. “Sport does not seem to be an exception to this pattern. That said, some losses sting more than others and some victories mean more than others,” he says.
Tracy offers the evolutionary context. “Bad is stronger than good, which is kind of the way psychologists talk about it,” she says. “When we feel bad, that’s a really important signal that we need to change our behaviour, often to survive. That’s why the negative often feels bigger than the positive. We evolved to really respond intensely to those negative signals.”
It’s not just losing that hurts, Tracy adds, but losing when you expected to win. “A team that loses year after year — it’s not fun, it certainly doesn’t evoke any pride, but it’s not as horribly shaming as it is to lose the big game that you really expected to win,” she adds.
And yet fans return, season after season. Tracy points to the community that forms around shared experience, including shared suffering. “It makes us feel part of our environment and less alone,” she says. “There’s probably solidarity with other fans who are going through the same thing.”
Canadian and Qatari supporters fill BC Place during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. For many supporters, the crowd itself is part of the appeal, offering a chance to be part of something larger than oneself. Photo: Alycia S, ASC Communications
“Even if you didn’t enter the stadium as a die-hard team Canada fan, celebrating six goals alongside thousands of others is a major bonding experience that makes us feel connected to each other and something bigger than ourselves.”
The power of the crowd
Part of what draws fans back, Armitage suggests, is what the crowd itself offers, something perhaps seen most clearly during global tournaments like the FIFA World Cup. “In the modern world, where we’re expected to be always on show and promoting ourselves, it’s great to be able to go somewhere and just be part of something,” he says. “The rituals before, during, and after the game allow you to escape the pressures of modern life and exist as part of a group without having to perform.”
Armitage knows this feeling firsthand. Attending a Champions League match—not as a fan of either team, but as a researcher—he found himself swept up anyway. “The anthem comes on, everyone stands up, so what do you do? You stand up. And then the music kicks in, and you lose yourself,” he recalls. “You become part of a psychological crowd. The contagion is there — you feel it.”
For a few hours, life becomes something simpler. “It just becomes us versus them, home versus away, your colour versus theirs,” Armitage says. He likens the stadium to theatre, but unscripted: “You have a play on the stage that’s unwritten. You have rules, but you don’t know the outcome. The players come from the same origins as the crowd; they emerge from the chorus onto the main stage, and the crowd remains as the chorus, interpreting everything in real time. When a goal happens, or a penalty is awarded, or someone is sent off — all three stages, the pitch and the two sets of fans, coalesce and pandemonium sets off.”
That reaction is made possible, Armitage explains, by something the crowd uniquely offers: anonymity. “You can be absorbed into something larger, which is when emotional contagion happens,” he says. “This is your steam valve of society and where people let things off. It’s a cathartic experience.”
Tracy’s research confirms the mechanism. “When you’re with people who feel a certain emotion, you are more likely to start feeling that emotion. It is literally contagious,” she adds.
Studying German fans during the 2018 World Cup, Götz found that while strongly identified fans responded most intensely to results, the crowd itself had an independent pull. “Everybody feels something. Even non-fans tend to get drawn in,” he says.
More than a game
Armitage is clear that sport is simply the most visible expression of a much broader human behaviour. The same dynamic—collective identity formed through shared ritual and emotional experience—plays out at concerts, in religious services, fan clubs built around artists, or shared passions. “It’s the same mechanism at play, just a slightly different arena,” he says.
Götz saw this at a national scale during the 2006 World Cup in Germany when the team’s success created a wave of shared national pride. “It was a moment that transcended all societal strata and united people, whether they had previously cared about soccer or not,” he says. “In a way, it redefined many Germans’ relationship with their country.”
He sees the early signs of something similar taking shape in Vancouver. Canada’s men’s national team is in the tournament, they are scoring goals, and people who have never watched soccer are paying attention. “This builds a social and cultural momentum that soccer rarely achieves in our hockey-dominated society,” Götz adds. “Even if you didn’t enter the stadium as a die-hard team Canada fan, celebrating six goals alongside thousands of others is a major bonding experience that makes us feel connected to each other and something bigger than ourselves.”
