More Than Football: Why the World Cup Feels Good

Someone I know told me something during this World Cup that stayed with me. She has never been a football fan—the game has never particularly interested her. And yet she found herself home alone, stumbled on the match while flipping channels, and stayed glued to the screen for an hour and a half.

What surprised her wasn’t the game itself, but the sense of wellbeing it gave her. “I felt part of that energy,” she told me. And for the first time in a period marked by anxiety, she felt at peace.

As a psychotherapist, what interested me wasn’t that she had watched football. It was that an event she had never cared about seemed to quiet something inside her.

A ritual, not just a match

The images of the crowd, the commentators’ voices, the players’ faces, the spectacular plays, the simple fact of taking part in something alongside millions of other people: it’s no coincidence that all of this can produce a sense of wellbeing.

More than a century ago, the sociologist Émile Durkheim described what he called collective effervescence: the emotional energy that emerges when people gather around the same ritual, sharing attention, emotion and purpose. Although he studied religious ceremonies, he believed the phenomenon was universal. Whether at a concert, a political demonstration or a football match, participating in something larger than ourselves can generate a profound sense of vitality and connection.

Around the same time, Sigmund Freud approached the same phenomenon from a different angle. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, he suggested that groups do more than bring people together—they temporarily reshape our inner experience. Through identification with a group, our attention shifts away from ourselves, our emotions become attuned to those around us, and we begin to experience the group’s hopes and fears as partly our own. Belonging, in other words, is not simply a social experience; it is also a psychological one.

Why our minds are built this way

Several decades later, John Bowlby’s attachment theory offered another way of understanding why experiences like these can feel so regulating. From the very beginning of life, we learn to manage distress in relationship with others. A caregiver’s presence does not simply comfort us; it helps us organise overwhelming emotions into something we can bear. As we grow, we gradually internalise this capacity, but we never become entirely self-sufficient. Throughout life, our emotional equilibrium continues to depend, in part, on experiences of connection, recognition and shared meaning.

From a psychodynamic perspective, collective rituals can offer a temporary form of psychological holding. They provide a shared emotional space in which hope, fear, excitement and disappointment are experienced alongside others rather than in isolation. Our personal problems do not disappear, but for a while they no longer feel as though they rest solely on our shoulders.

The World Cup is a particularly powerful example of this process. Millions of people direct their attention to the same event, anticipate the same moments, celebrate the same goals and mourn the same defeats. Even those who have little interest in football can find themselves drawn into this shared emotional rhythm. For ninety minutes, they are carried by something larger than themselves.

Why it works even if you’re not a fan

What makes the World Cup distinctive is precisely that you don’t need to be passionate about football to be affected by it.

During the tournament, a collective identity becomes available almost effortlessly. Many people find themselves identifying with a national team, a shared story and a common emotional rhythm, even if they would never normally describe themselves as football supporters. What matters is not expertise in the sport but participation in the experience.

This may be especially meaningful during periods of anxiety. Anxiety tends to narrow our attention, trapping us inside repetitive thoughts and making us feel alone with them. Shared rituals gently interrupt that process. By inviting us into a common emotional world, they shift our attention outward and remind us—if only briefly—that emotional life is not something we have to carry entirely on our own.

A small detail worth noticing

I don’t think the person I mentioned at the start discovered a passion for football.

I think she discovered, almost by accident, something she had been missing: the relief of feeling psychologically held by a shared experience.

You don’t need to become a football fan to care for that need. But it is worth paying attention to those moments, however unexpected, when we feel part of something larger than ourselves. They remind us of a simple psychological truth: our wellbeing is not built through self-reflection alone. It also depends on the relationships, rituals and communities that help us feel connected, recognised and less alone.

Sources & Further Reading

• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss. Volume I: Attachment. London: Hogarth Press.
• Durkheim, É. (1912). Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Paris: Alcan. — the founding text of social anthropology in which the concept of “collective effervescence” was introduced
• Gabriel, S., Naidu, E., Paravati, E., Morrison, C. D., & Gainey, K. (2020). Creating the sacred from the profane: Collective effervescence and everyday activities. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 15(1), 129–154.
• Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Edition, Vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press.
• Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock.
• Coan, J. A., & Sbarra, D. A. (2015). Social Baseline Theory: The Social Regulation of Risk and Effort. Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 87–91.
• Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent–Infant Relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, 585–595.