Loading article...

We Won

By Sarah Rasmi Ph.D. - 7/9/2026, 4:55 PM - 1,103 words

Original source

Faulty reasoning signals

Article text

Fans tend to say "we won" after a victory but "they lost" after a defeat in a well-documented pattern.

Basking in reflected glory means borrowing self-esteem from a team we do not control.

Research finds that people favor their own group even when it forms at random.

Football gives our group instinct somewhere to go, with a scoreboard and a final whistle.

Egypt went out, and I felt it in my chest.

I carried a whole day of low-grade heaviness over 90 minutes of football, played by people I have never met, in a tournament I have no influence over. It doesn't make rational sense, and yet millions of us across this region were feeling the same thing at the same moment.

You have some version of this story if you were anywhere near a screen this month. I am going to explain what is happening from a psychological lens.

We are made for this

Psychologists have argued for decades that the need to belong sits among our most fundamental human needs, almost as basic as food and shelter (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). We instinctively attach ourselves to groups and do badly when alone. People with strong social ties tend to be happier, healthier, and more satisfied with their lives than those who are isolated.

A football team's fandom is an unusually easy group to join, and the World Cup hands 2 or 3 billion of us a group at once. What happens next is totally predictable to social psychologists, though it rarely feels that way to us as spectators and fans.

Listen to the pronouns

Pay attention to how anybody talks after a match.

When the team wins, it is "we won, we were amazing." When they lose, it becomes "they lost, they were awful."

Social psychologists have a name for the first response: basking in reflected glory. In a set of now-classic field studies, Cialdini and colleagues (1976) found that university students were far likelier to wear their school's colors on the Monday after their football team had won than after it had lost. Students described a victory by saying "we" and a defeat by saying "they".

The opposite has a name too: cutting off reflected failure. This is what happens the moment a loss lands and we need a little distance between ourselves and the team. It's interesting how quickly we can shift from "us" to "them".

What we are doing is managing our own self-esteem through a team we have no control over. Their success feels like ours even though all we did was sit down and watch, and their failure is something we would rather not be too closely associated with.

It may seem a little ridiculous, but we do the same thing in other group settings: the schools we attended, the companies we work for, and the cities we live in. We borrow a sense of who we are from the groups that still have us. The World Cup only makes it impossible to ignore.

How quickly we make an "us"

The more unsettling part is how little it takes.

In classic minimal group studies, researchers divided strangers into two groups on the basis of something entirely meaningless like a coin toss or a preference for one painter over another. They found that people began favoring their group almost immediately—not because the group meant anything but simply because it existed (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).

Your team is much the same. In most cases, you did not select them after careful deliberation. You were born somewhere, or your parents were, and that was that. And yet within minutes of kick-off your brain has sorted the world into "ours" and "theirs".

Football gives that instinct somewhere reasonably safe to go. Our loyalty, the rivalry, and passion get poured into 90 minutes with a scoreboard and a final whistle and then most of us get on with our lives.

Watching from the country that did not qualify

I have watched this entire tournament from the UAE, which did not qualify this time. And so did almost everyone around me.

This is a place made up of people from everywhere, cheering for wherever they came from, alongside Emiratis cheering for the teams they love. On a single evening you can walk past several cafes and hear several different anthems. It is a whole country holding onto home, together, in a place that has become home for us too.

People who have lived in the UAE know exactly what I mean. We build a life somewhere that is not where we started. Yet, we feel the pull of somewhere else the moment a match kicks off at 3 am. You watch it, get up anyway, and then continue with your day. I think the inconvenience is part of the point; we are willing to give up sleep and other things for a match as it's one of the ways to prove to ourselves what actually matters.

Sport and Competition Essential Reads

What a Sports Psychiatrist Actually Does

Why Sport Brings People Together

The part worth keeping

The scores will fade soon enough. Someone will lift a trophy, and we will all go back to our lives.

But for a few weeks, millions of people who will never meet one another feel precisely the same thing at precisely the same moment. Strangers high five in cafes, grown men weep openly without anybody telling them to pull themselves together, and whole neighborhoods hold their breath at once.

The same wiring that can divide people in the ugliest of ways is the wiring that can make all of us feel, briefly and collectively, like family. It is the same instinct, pointed at something joyful. That seems worth holding onto, whatever the scoreline.

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.

Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34(3), 366-375.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33-47). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Sarah Rasmi, Ph.D. , is a licensed psychologist and managing director of Thrive Wellbeing Centre in Dubai, UAE. She also teaches and conducts research at the American University of Sharjah.

Visit Thrive's Website , Facebook , X , LinkedIn , Instagram