I was meeting somebody for a drink after work recently but was running a little early, so I sat down on a bench in City Hall Park in lower Manhattan, pulled out my phone and checked how my Oakland A’s were doing (if you’re drawing a blank, it’s a baseball team; “A’s” is short for Athletics).
They were beating the Toronto Blue Jays 4-0. I looked over the scoring summary and noticed that every run so far had been either scored or driven in by light-hitting catcher Jonathan Lucroy. When I texted this thrilling news to my son, he responded, “huh.” I toggled back to the game and the A’s had scored again, with Lucroy driving in the run. This news got an “lol” from my son.
It was a moment of baseball bliss in a summer during which the A’s have afforded many of them. But I’m not here to write about the Oakland A’s. I’m here to write about sports and happiness.
In a working paper released this past spring, University of Sussex economists Peter Dolton and George MacKerron make the case that the two are not compatible. Soccer fans in the U.K., they found, report much bigger declines in happiness after their team loses a game than gains in happiness after their team wins. As the Washington Post’s Wonkblog put it in the headline of a post that summarized the study, “British economists prove it: Sports destroy happiness.”
I find it hard to believe that sports truly does destroy happiness, at least for most fans. This is partly for the list of possible reasons that Dolton and MacKerron include at the end of their paper, such as mismeasurement and the pleasure derived from “being in a tribe.” But it’s also because I would guess that most people who follow sports are smart enough to do it in ways that don’t leave them utterly bereft when a particular team loses.
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson outlined one approach in May, that of rooting for teams that, you know, win:
“Rooting for winners is more than acceptable – it’s commendable. Fans shouldn’t put up with awfully managed teams for decades just because their parents liked those teams, as if sports were governed by the same rules and customs as medieval inheritance. Fans should feel free to shop for teams the way they do for any other product,” he wrote.
There is a way, though, to get mostly good vibes out of sports without forgoing underdog victories and abandoning childhood loyalties.
• Assemble a portfolio of teams. This is a variant of fair-weather fandom that, like Harry Markowitz’s portfolio theory, involves not picking one best team but two or more teams that will presumably be good at different times. It’s not foolproof but if you come to a sport without any childhood allegiances, as I did with Premier League soccer upon moving to London in 2000, you can be strategic about this.
For various reasons, I chose perennially mediocre West Ham as “my team,” and I will surely be over the moon if they ever win anything significant, but I quietly adopted much-more-successful Liverpool and somewhat-more-successful Tottenham as backups.
• Root for players, not just teams. More generally, appreciating great athletes, and cheering them on when they’re facing any team but one of your own, seems like a reliable happiness-increaser.
• You don’t have to pay attention. If the A’s were having a bad season, I wouldn’t have bothered to stop in the park and check that score recently. I spend far more time on the A’s during winning seasons than losing ones.
Maybe this is the key: I’m not a die-hard sports fan. True die-hards probably really are miserable.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
