Cheering during matches is harmful to health.. It causes “broken heart syndrome and identity merging”!

During the 2014 World Cup, which was held in Brazil, a 58-year-old Chilean fan suffered a heart attack after a player on his country’s national team missed a penalty kick. A short time later, his wife also felt severe chest pains and was taken to the hospital after she developed a condition resulting from extreme stress known as cardiomyopathy, known as “broken heart syndrome.” This indicates that the extreme stress and emotion that accompanies a football fan may result in… A sudden collapse in heart function that may cause part of the heart to stop working. Although the chances of such a health setback occurring are considered relatively weak for healthy people, this does not mean that a healthy fan is completely immune to any physical effects, as a recent study showed that cheering during football matches is associated with a number of health effects, which may not always be noticeable or of a dramatic nature, but they definitely affect a person’s general health.

Dr. Matt Butler, a psychiatrist and neurologist at Imperial College London, says: “Cheering during football matches is far from a negative behavior. The mind and body respond in the same way to direct physical competition. When we see players sweating on the field, the body reacts as if we were also participating in the match.” Butler added in statements to the website Popular Science, which specializes in scientific research: “There is a psychological process known as (identity fusion), which sometimes occurs in the case of an enthusiastic fan who feels the course of the match that his favorite team is playing as if he were experiencing it himself.” A research team conducted an experiment on Spanish football fans while watching their country’s national team play in the World Cup final in 2010, and found that the fans’ bodies were secreting much more cortisol, which is known as the “stress hormone,” than the human body normally secretes, and that this percentage was greater in men, young people, and fans who were enthusiastic about their sports teams.

Scientists believe that this phenomenon is due to what is known as “self-preservation in the social context,” meaning that any person wants to be proud of himself and for others to see him in a good light. Therefore, when any event occurs that threatens this desire, such as watching your favorite team lose the match, for example, the mind deals with this event as a threat, which prompts the body to respond by secreting the hormone cortisol. Researchers say that this effect is not limited to the time of the match only, as a research team that followed fans of the German national team over the course of 12 weeks using smart digital watches to measure the vital functions of the body found that stress levels among these fans begin to rise 12 hours before the start of their country’s national team matches. In addition to the cortisol hormone, the “fight or flight” response, which is the body’s physiological reaction in the event of exposure to imminent danger or a serious threat, leads to the flow of adrenaline and similar chemicals into the bloodstream, resulting in an accelerated heartbeat and high blood pressure, which makes the heart need more oxygen to continue performing its vital functions. At the same time, these chemicals cause the blood vessels that feed the heart to constrict, which in turn reduces the amount of oxygen that reaches the heart.

Doctors say that this conflict between the need for additional amounts of oxygen and its insufficient availability can sometimes lead to heart attacks. But Dr. Butler wants to set the record straight regarding this theory, and explains that although watching football matches increases the risk of heart problems, the chance of this happening remains small for the vast majority of people. A study conducted in Spain during local league matches observed a 30% increase in the incidence of heart attacks requiring hospitalization, but this is concentrated among men who already suffer from heart problems and on days when their favorite teams are defeated in matches, according to Popular Science.

A scientific study conducted during the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands in 2010 observed an increase in levels of testosterone in fans while watching the match. Unlike the hormone cortisol, this increase was not related to age, gender, or the extent of the fan’s interest in the team. Butler says, “The level of testosterone rises when exposed to competitive situations, and therefore it is not surprising that the amount of this substance increases in the body while watching matches, regardless of the fan’s age or gender.”

On the other hand, a study conducted in conjunction with the European Nations Championship in 2024, which included monitoring the sexual behaviors of about a thousand fans from five European countries over the course of the tournament, found that fans’ sexual activity increases by 27% if their national teams win the match compared to what happens when those teams are defeated. Perhaps this confirms some prevailing beliefs that important tournaments are usually followed by a boom in the number of births nine months after their events end. Butler says that football is not the only sport that leads to physiological changes in the bodies of its fans. Rather, similar effects occur to fans during basketball, rugby, and American football matches, but the difference, he believes, is due to the fact that football matches usually do not witness the scoring of a large number of goals, and therefore a single goal may have a profound impact on a person, as it may bring overwhelming happiness to one party and resounding shock to the other party, which is a burden that the human body may often have to bear for the sake of sport and love. Football victories.