Lucky Shirts, Same Seats: Football Superstitions

Every football ground is full of quiet rituals. A supporter who always wears the same unwashed shirt, a player who has to be last out of the tunnel, a fan who will not change seats after a win. Football is a game of chance played by people who hate chance, and superstition is how many of them cope.

Some of these habits are private. Others have become part of the history of the game, and one of them, a curse said to have been laid on a great club, lasted longer than the man who supposedly spoke it.

A kiss for luck

The best-known superstition of the 1990s belonged to France's defender Laurent Blanc, who kissed the head of his friend and goalkeeper Fabien Barthez before the start of every match, supposedly for luck. The ritual went with them to the 1998 World Cup, which France won, and later to Manchester United, where they kept it up for Champions League matches.

The 1998 tournament also shows the limits of luck. Blanc scored the first golden goal in World Cup history against Paraguay on 28 June 1998, then was sent off in the semi-final against Croatia, the only red card of his international career, and missed the final. France beat Brazil 3-0 without him.

The curse of Béla Guttmann

Benfica won the European Cup in 1961 and again in 1962 under the Hungarian coach Béla Guttmann. After the second final, the story goes, he asked the club for a pay rise, was refused and left, saying that Benfica would not be champions of Europe again for a hundred years.

Benfica went on to lose five European Cup finals: in 1963, 1965, 1968, 1988 and 1990. Before the 1990 final in Vienna, the club's greatest player, Eusébio, reportedly prayed at Guttmann's grave and asked him to lift the curse. Benfica lost again. A statue of Guttmann now stands at the club's Estádio da Luz in Lisbon, a strange honour for a man supposedly blamed for decades of failure.

A curse nobody can find

There is a twist. The writer David Bolchover found no documentary evidence that Guttmann ever said the words. The first mention he could identify appeared in May 1988 in the Portuguese paper Gazeta dos Desportos, and it seems to have grown from a loose translation of a 1967 interview. In 2011 Eusébio himself called the curse a lie.

For many fans the curse finally ended in 2022, when Benfica's under-19 team won the UEFA Youth League, a European trophy at last. The story shows how a superstition can be invented after the fact to explain a run of bad luck, and then outlive the evidence.

Why rituals help

Psychologists have taken superstition more seriously since about 2010, when, in the words of the psychologist Stuart Vyse, researchers stopped assuming it was simply irrational and started asking what it does for people. One answer is the illusion of control: people are most likely to reach for a ritual when the outcome is uncertain and matters a lot, which is a fair description of a cup final.

Another is calm. Vyse reports early work suggesting that rituals can lower stress and so help performance, which he calls a bit of calming magic, adding that any old ritual will do. A 2010 study in Psychological Science, titled Keep Your Fingers Crossed!, set out to test how superstition can improve performance. The point is not that the lucky shirt changes the score, but that wearing it can change the person.

Pigeons and penalty takers

The oldest scientific account of superstition comes from the psychologist B. F. Skinner, who in 1948 fed pigeons at fixed intervals whatever they did. Some developed odd routines, turning in circles or swinging their heads, as if their movements had brought the food. Rituals that were occasionally followed by a reward proved especially hard to stop. Some of Skinner's pigeons repeated their routine up to 10,000 times without any reward at all.

Football works the same way. A fan wears a shirt, the team wins, and the shirt becomes lucky; the losses that follow are blamed on something else. Other researchers have questioned Skinner's interpretation of his pigeons, but the pattern he described is easy to recognise on any terrace.

Part of belonging

Superstitions also bind people together. A shared ritual, the same pub before every home game or the same seat in the same row, is a way of belonging to a club and a crowd. It sits alongside the scarves, songs and traditions we look at in our guide to football fan culture.

Seen that way, a superstition is less a belief about luck than a promise to keep turning up. For the noise those rituals help create, see how football crowds build atmosphere through chants. And keeping a promise like that, season after season, is its own kind of luck.