The emotional slot machine of being a sports fan - Shikhar Sachdev

5:58am.

It was dark outside, the house was quiet, and I had somehow managed to wake up two minutes before my alarm.

A 3pm start in India meant an early wake up time for me. I figured that a 6am alarm would allow me to catch the last hour of the game, a fair compromise for someone that enjoys sleeping.

I tapped the Sling app on my iPhone and rubbed my groggy eyes. The game was reaching its crescendo, and my team, the Punjab Kings, needed a (very) ambitious last minute push to secure victory. For about 72 seconds, I put the phone away, convincing myself that the game was gone and I was better off catching up on sleep.

But the heart wants what it wants. My brain joins in the fun, too: it’s dumb enough to remind me of all the improbable comebacks that the great game has seen. My slumber stands no chance, and the iPhone comes out again, remaining glued to my face till the end of the game.

It wouldn’t be enough. An hour later, with the sun now shining bright, my favorite cricket team would be knocked out of contention from the IPL playoffs. I’d go back to bed while the rest of San Francisco would wake up.

It all felt like a bad dream. But did I really have anyone else to blame?

We’d lost our last six games, now. Hell, this wasn’t about just six games: twenty years of mediocre performance, seventeen without a single playoff appearance, and yet, each season I would participate in the emotional slot machine of watching my kings compete.

When my sports team wins, I feel like a winner. The team is an extension of me, and victory provides bragging rights. When they lose, I feel like shit. My shoulders slump. This despite not having moved my ass the entirety of the game (sometimes out of superstition, most times out of laziness). Their mistakes are my mistakes.

How ridiculous is that? I have no control over the outcome of this game. The millionaire superstars don’t know I exist. I have no way to affect what’s going to happen. And yet, just like clockwork, I let the result of a weekly game dictate my mood for at least a day. Maybe more.

It’s me. This is a me problem. But it’s also not, because I’m not the only one who suffers from this disease.

In 2011, a research study analyzed Major League Baseball fans’ willingness to perform a series of unusual behaviors if the acts would guarantee their team a World Series title. The researchers found that many people were willing to consider engaging in truly bizarre acts for the good of their team:

If I want to maximize happiness, I should pick a sports team that wins. A lot. Why subject myself to an emotional slot machine when I can pick a team that gets me better odds?

There are a few problems with this approach. One of them is that it assumes you get to pick.

Most of the time, your team picks you. The wand chooses the wizard, and if you happen to be born into a family that supports Tottenham Hotspurs, good luck picking Arsenal.

But let’s assume that you actually can pick your sports team.

Well, for one, it’s quite hard to pick a team that guarantees winning, season after season. If sport was that predictable, none of us would watch it.

Second, a team’s competency is just one of its attributes. My coworker, Ben, told me that when he picked the Tottenham Hotspurs 10 years ago, he purposefully picked a team that was good but not great, because picking a team that was already great would mean selling out. Now, at the time of writing this in 2026, they’re on the verge of relegation, and Ben is currently in Italy eating gelato. The story of Tottenham Hotspurs is proof that terrible things can happen to great people, like Ben.

Others have even picked teams because they simply liked its color:

When you pick a team that’s unpredictable, you might cherish the wins more.

This raises a question: are sports fans of teams that win a lot actually happier, or is supporting the underdog going to make you more happy?

Research shows that soccer fans are about twice as unhappy when their team loses as they are when their team wins. So, given any soccer match between two teams that doesn’t end in a draw, and assuming a roughly equal number of fans on each side, the net result of that game will be a destruction of happiness.

But there is also research that shows that people get more joy out of unexpected successes than expected ones. So our expectations seem to play a part in the amount of happiness that we derive from a game. I’m not sure if the above research paper takes that into account.

Specifically, research shows us that if we took the expected value of an underdog win (i.e. the odds of the win times the amount of pleasure that someone would get from that win), it will always be higher than the expected value of a bet on the favorite. And so it might even make more sense to root for the team that’s more likely to lose.

Here’s the problem: I always have expectations. The Punjab Kings play in the...