Many people feel devastated after their favourite team loses. Sometimes they have trouble sleeping. That raises some legitimate questions: Why suffer? Is it even rational to be a sports fan? Recent research suggests that it might not be. On average, soccer, the most popular sport on the planet, makes people a lot less happy. The lesson is that if you’re strongly attached to your local team, you might be better off if you decide to disengage — starting right now. Peter Dolton and George MacKerron of the University of Sussex linked several large data sets. To measure people’s happiness, they used millions of reports from tens of thousands of people, mostly in the UK, who recorded their levels of happiness at various times in the day, and who also reported on what they were doing during those times. They also used data on all English and Scottish soccer matches during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 seasons. The data included the date, the odds and the results. By connecting the happiness data with the soccer data, they could see how people’s happiness was affected by the outcome of the match. They made reasonable assumptions about which team people were most likely to support, based on where they lived and which matches they had attended in the past.
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