Arsenal, Tottenham and the 'amoral' but 'delicious' art of rubbernecking

AFC BournemouthArsenalAston VillaBrentfordBrighton & Hove AlbionBurnleyChelseaCrystal PalaceEvertonFulhamLeeds UnitedLiverpoolManchester CityManchester UnitedNewcastle UnitedNottingham ForestSunderlandTottenham HotspurWest Ham UnitedWolverhampton WanderersScores & ScheduleStandingsFantasyThe Athletic FC NewsletterPodcastsPremier Manchester City fans mocking Arsenal, Eberechi Eze during the defat on Sunday and a Tottenham Hotspur fan in November Photos: Alex Pantling, Carl Recine, Julian Finney/Getty Images; design: Will Tullos Share articleBottled water sales were through the roof outside the Etihad Stadium on Sunday afternoon. Not so much because Manchester City fans were particularly concerned with staying hydrated while watching their side take on league leaders Arsenal, but because the bottles were labeled with the north London side’s crest. Arsenal bottles. Arsenal bottlers. The meme potential has been obvious since City dismantled Chelsea 3-0 this month, 24 hours after Arsenal lost against Bournemouth, and the Sky television cameras lingered on a City fan sipping from an Arsenal-branded water bottle in mock celebration. Rival fans shared it on social media to poke fun at Arsenal supporters, the jibe stinging even more given the team finished second in the Premier League three seasons running. It’s not just City fans who are (understandably, given their position in the table) transfixed by Arsenal’s apparent inability to get over the line. The rest of the football world also seems unable to look away, watching for Arsenal’s results almost as keenly as those of the teams they support. It’s a similar story elsewhere in the capital, where Tottenham Hotspur’s nightmare season threatens to end in a first relegation since 1977. Who can look away when a club of that stature is spiralling towards the unthinkable? Taking pleasure in a rival’s misfortune is nothing new, especially in football. It’s often allied with the universal human emotion, schadenfreude, from the German words Schaden (“damage/harm”) and Freude (“joy”). “It has been described as the most amoral of all emotions,” says Dr Matt Butler, a research fellow at King’s College London who researches neuropsychiatry and published a scientific paper on the behavioural neuroscience of football. “But there’s something quite delicious about it as a football fan.” He explains that studies of football fans have shown that the same areas of the brain that show activity when they see their teams win also light up when rival teams do badly. “These are the pleasure centres of the brain, so it’s inherently a rewarding, even joyful experience sometimes,” says Butler. “And there’s some evidence that suggests that in football fans, it’s more prominent after their own team has lost or is going through a bad patch. So it can be seen as an emotion to remedy the sadness or disappointment of loss.” The joy at seeing a rival lose can sometimes be powerful enough to override the feeling of one’s own team winning. In May 1995, many Liverpool fans were torn over the possibility that a win for their side over title-chasing Blackburn Rovers could hand the league to their fierce rivals, Manchester United. In the event, Liverpool won but United drew at West Ham United, meaning Rovers topped the table regardless: the celebrations at Anfield when news that United had fallen short were just as throaty as those that had greeted Liverpool’s two goals. Last year, the notion that some — maybe even most — Tottenham fans would have been happy to see their side lose to Manchester City to help deny Arsenal the league title infuriated the then-Spurs head coach Ange Postecoglou. “I don’t understand it, I never will,” Postecoglou told a press conference. “I understand rivalry — I was part of one of the biggest ones in the world in the last couple of years with Celtic and Rangers — but I’ve never and will never understand if someone wants their own team to lose.” Yet the feeling is real. In 2017, a team of Harvard social psychologists asked fans of rival baseball teams — the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox — how much they would pay to produce either their own team’s win versus the rival team’s loss. The study found that, overall, fans were willing to pay more for the rival’s loss. That can be driven by various factors, including envy, moral values and the bonding power of seeing a rival do badly, says Butler. “We’re a cooperative species, but we also have it in us to feel envious when a rival does. Seeing them do badly can remedy that.” If there is a sense that the rival deserves their misfortune, the feelings can intensify. “Just seeing someone bad fail can inherently feel good,” Butler explains. Some research also shows that schadenfreude can bind people together, particularly when one’s own team is not doing so well. “So much of football fandom is about collective group identity,” says Butler, “so schadenfreude has this collective social dimension whereby it strengthens the group in response, particularly to defeat — that social cohesion is really important in football fans.” Inequality and status also play important roles, says Dr Mark Doidge, reader in sociology of sport at Loughborough University. “We define ourselves based on our perceived equals or power imbalances,” he explains. “Football is the perfect example of a hierarchy and rivals. It is a league table, with historic and geographic rivalries.” Desecrating your rival is one way to assert status, he adds. This could be through the actual violence of fan hooliganism, but also through symbolic violence like removing stickers depicting your rival, singing songs about them or laughing at their demise. When it comes to the current examples of fans of rival teams ‘rubbernecking’ at what’s happening on both the red and white sides of north London, Doidge puts it partly down to status. “Arsenal and Spurs both consider themselves to be in the ‘Big Six’, which is why they wanted to form the European Super League,” he says. “They are seen to have big stadiums and lots of money, which automatically puts them outside the majority of football teams in the UK. “You also have the fact they are both in north London, which is seen as a wealthy part of London, and by extension, the UK. Add in a pronounced anti-London bias from some sections of the media and politicians, and this infuses a rivalry against London clubs, but also wealthy clubs.” There may well have been an element of that at play with the City fans unfurling a banner reading ‘Panic on the Streets of London’ — a nod to the song by the Manchester-based band The Smiths — at full time on Sunday. Tottenham may be one of the more deprived areas of London but for Doidge, the club’s wealth — they posted record revenues of £565.3million ($742m) in their most recent accounts, even if the wider picture was not so rosy — is particularly pertinent to how people are reacting to them. He believes that those taking pleasure in their difficulties this season would be doing the same if it were happening to Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool. “Seeing big clubs being brought down to size is a great leveller in sport. We all want to see our club succeed, we also want to see billionaire clubs who are distorting the football pyramid being relegated.” Is any of this new or different from any other time in the history of the game? “I’m not sure”, says John Williams, associate professor of sociology at the University of Leicester who has spent his working life examining British football’s history and the game’s cultural and social impact. “You can be sure when Sir Alex Ferguson was in his pomp at United or Bob Paisley was in charge at Liverpool, rival fans were doing something similar.” What has changed, points out Williams, is social media and the “fan blog-o-sphere”, plus the 24/7 coverage of the game and everything around it. There are, to put it bluntly, many more ways to ‘hate-watch’ a rival’s downfall (or listen to them discuss it on a podcast) than in the past. “Intense support for a club is like an extension of the self — and not wanting others to succeed at our cost is a typical response,” says Williams. “There is so much coverage (and much of it negative), it is hard to escape the seduction of seeing a close rival fail. Was it like this when Spurs and Chelsea were relegated in the 1970s? Partly, yes, but then not everyone could join in.” How much, if anything, does this pleasure in other teams’ failings tell us about human nature in general? Butler is reluctant to be “too conclusive” but says that football does “co-opt psychological and emotional phenomena that we evolved to have, so it’s not like something gets created out of nothing”. In many ways, though, it is artificial. Football is not the same thing as real life, however much it might sometimes feel that way. There are parallels in “the way that people behave in groups”, according to Butler. “The way that people identify with something a little bit abstract, like a football team, but also even a nation state. “It does give us some fascinating insights into the possibilities of what we can understand about human behaviours through something like football. It’s a bit less contentious than it would be for nations to compete with each other, for example.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms