Aaron C.T. Smith

We know from research fans are twice as likely to change their marriage partner as they are their sporting team allegiance.

But what's beautiful about sport is that that love tends not to diminish, unlike our romantic partners with whom we get bored.

People like me see a connection between sport as a kind of religion.

And now, of course, we've been talking about sport as religion forever, but what's interesting now is that there's a new series of evidence from fields like cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

And it seems that the brain doesn't really care whether religion is supernatural or secular.

What happens in the brain during worship and during fandom are kind of similar.

And it's because the brain's hardwired to believe and to believe strongly, to have, you know, strongest form of belief, of course, is faith.

And the ability to have faith also means that sport gives us a kind of opportunity to lose ourselves in something bigger than us.

and experience what for many of us, I think, is really true belonging.

And that might be one of the, I think, the greatest consolations for feeling a bit trivial in a world that's kind of easy to feel marginalized and inconsequential in.

So for me, this isn't just about sport.

It's really about the brain's need for faith to be connected to a tribe.

Our search for meaning and, you know, sometimes that just happens to involve watching people chase a ball.

I think that's why across human history and civilization, you know, sport's proven to be inevitable.

Right and that's connected directly of course to our sense of tribal identification and it is amplified also by the nature of the way our brains work.

We are connected to that tribal sense of association

And so it's not just sufficient for us to bond around our own team, but also bond around a common enemy.

And so that sense of rivalry, whether it's Duke and North Carolina, Army and Navy, and all of this is about what connects us to our team is also part of what disconnects us from other tribes and fans.

The actual exposure to sports and our decisions to become fans of one team or another is not much of a decision as it turns out based on the research.

For people of our generation perhaps, and going back in the past, the biggest impact was our families, specifically our fathers.