Fans keep searching charms, even though
SUPERSTITIOUS SUPPORTERS JUST CAN’T LET GO OF THEIR RITUALS
THERE are two types of football fan in this world; those who think superstition and good-luck rituals are a bunch of nonsense and those who know they’re nonsense, but cling to them anyway.
Superstition is part and parcel of sport. Professional athletes are renowned for being among the most superstitious people on earth, religiously faithful to rituals and routines which they feel can give them the tiny edge they need to succeed.
The greatest ice hockey player of all time, Wayne Gretzky would get twitchy if his stick ever touched any other player’s stick in the run-up to a game, to the point where he would re-tape it every time it happened. He also refused to cut his hair before travelling for an away fixture after once losing a post-haircut game.
Boston Red Sox legend Wade Boggs was notoriously obsessive about his routine, eating fried chicken before every game and writing the Hebrew word for life (chai) in the dirt before he went up to bat.
Björn Borg would grow a beard specifically for Wimbledon every year and wear the same t-shirt every time he returned to the All England Club.
Footballers are in no way imune to this way of thinking. Most footballers are said to have their own little habits and routines which they feel can bring them luck.
It’s the reason Jack Grealish plays with his socks rolled down to his ankles. Former Arsenal, Man City and Liverpool defender Kolo Toure always insisted on being the last one out of the tunnel and Frank Lampard went through a period where he peed in the exact same urinal before every Chelsea home game.
That’s strangely not the only urinerelated superstition in football. Former Argentine international keeper Sergio Goycochea would urinate on the pitch before every penalty shootout, including twice at the 1998 World Cup.
Perhaps it’s understandable that these top competitors, who spend all their time searching for small advantages to tip the scales in their favour, end up banking on lucky charms. It’s a little stranger when supporters in the stand adopt a similar mindset, but that’s exactly what a lot of us do.
Whether it’s wearing the same lucky shirt, socks or pants to every game, eating the same pre-match snack or taking the same specific route to the stadium, fans have all sorts of rituals which they stick to every game because they feel it brings an element of luck.
I spoke to a lot of fans while researching this. One said he didn’t wash his favourite shirt if his team was on a hot streak, which could get a bit smelly after a while. Another said if he missed a game and the Swans won, he would deliberately miss the next one in the illogical hope that he was somehow the difference maker.
Wearing lucky items of clothing, eating the same pre-match meal or buying a programme from the same seller each week seemed to come up quite regularly, but there were others which were less common.
Drinking from the same specific mug before every game, stopping en route to the stadium to donate change to the exact same homeless person each week and even leaving a game early in a bid to trigger a late winner were among the more interesting ones.
According to a 2018 study published in the Journal of Sport Behaviour, fans are prone to superstitious behaviour in a similar way to athletes. In the case of supporters, these little habbits are relatively simple things they can do to give them a feeling of control over an uncertain event.
Superstitions are most likely to appear at times of great stress or before games of major significance, when we feel our team needs every last shred of help to get across the line.
Of course, fans know perfectly well that wearing the same pants they wore to the 2011 play-off final won’t help Swansea get a win in 2021. Eating a burger from the van outside the ground at exactly 2.47pm on a Saturday won’t make it any more likely that you’ll be celebrating at 5pm.
But football is one of the only areas of everyday life where this type of totally irrational thought process is in any way normal. It makes zero sense, but so many of us do these things anyway and I should know because I can match pretty much anybody for loonyness when it comes to superstitions.
I have a lucky Swans shirt which I started wearing when Paul Clement’s side pulled off the great escape in 2017. The fact I also wore it throughout the following season when we were miserably relegated has not managed to convince me deep down that the shirt has no magic powers.
Before every game I walk up and down the same set of stairs at the Swansea.com Stadium. Why? I probably accidentally did it once, saw us win and decided to keep doing it.
I also have a weird sense that seeing a swan (a real bird, not just somebody in a Swansea shirt) on a match day will bring bad luck. I can’t remember when exactly this started but it was definitely during a bad run when we were losing pretty much every week, so I’m guessing my runin with waterfowl on a random morning walk probably had little to do with the poor results at that time.
My point is that I know these little superstitions are meaningless, but by now I think I would feel a bit awkward if I didn’t perform most of these rituals every week.
I don’t behave like this with anything else. I don’t take a lucky pen to work in the hope it makes me more productive or wear a lucky hat to buy a lottery ticket. That would be silly.
But football is different and that’s even more apparent when there’s a big game on the horizon.
Next week sees Cardiff City travel down the M4 for the first South Wales derby of the season. The Jack Army is already gearing up for the occasion. The desperation to win can drive the superstitious among us to new levels of lunacy and even many of those who usually rise above such ridiculousness can sometimes find themselves thinking differently for such a vital clash.
With so much riding on the match, fans will be looking for every lucky charm they can find, even though we all know it’s entirely pointless.