Football fans tend to be highly loyal to their group, just as the kin groups of our ancestral past would have been. This intense state of belonging, when a person feels as one with their group, is called identity fusion.
My new study, looking at fans of the UK’s Premier League, found supporters of the most long-suffering clubs were more “fused” to their clubs. They even considered each other more like a family compared with fans of reliably successful clubs.
Some fans even said they were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, in a hypothetical situation, giving their own lives to save other supporters of their team. But why do football fans bond so intensely with their club and their fellow fans, people they may have never met?
The research
We used a decade of club statistics to select the five most consistently successful and the five least successful clubs in the UK’s top football league, the Premiership. The top five clubs selected were Manchester United,…