The pleasure I feel from the potential demise of Manchester City feels chemical, not dissimilar to a party drug. It is a feeling that is very familiar; I also felt it deeply when I saw Manchester United captain Bruno Fernandes getting sent off against my team, Wolves, on Sky Sports on Boxing Day in 2024. His clear distress—I’m sure he was actually crying—was a little festive pleasure for all the family.
On another occasion, I opted to watch a flailing Liverpool on a Sunday afternoon last season instead of a pre-arranged movie (Frankenstein) with my wife. I suspected, correctly, that Liverpool would get beaten as they were on a terrible run. I could picture my plastic Scouser of a brother sitting deflated and solemn in his Brighton flat surrounded by his fellow plastic Scousers, a cabal of Southerners who have probably been to Anfield fewer times than they have big toenails.
This is a brother I love and would do anything for in normal circumstances. Normally, his pain would open my heart, not send me sprinting up and down the kitchen muttering ‘ha ha ha’ and ‘good’, with an evil grin I would find clinically concerning on anyone else.
My wife got to spend the evening with a monster after all.
For a moment, I felt ashamed of my reaction to the recent Man City scandal until I remembered how quickly and involuntarily football schadenfreude can arise. While doing my book research, I was staggered by how many football fans have been put into brain scanners, or been attached to electrodes, in order to investigate their reactions to the suffering and misfortune of rival fans and teams.
For example, in one study, fans were put in scanners and made to watch fellow fans being given painful electric shocks. The empathy hubs of their brains lit up. Then they were shown rival fans being given electric shocks. The empathy hubs weren’t so interested. Worse still, the regions of their brains responsible for reward and pleasure lit up like floodlights.
I also spoke to the Ajax-supporting Dutch professor of psychology Wilco van Dijk about football schadenfreude—he is an expert—and he admitted that he has a grubby little secret. When Germany, the arch-rivals of the Dutch, are losing a game of football, he sometimes switches over to listen to the German commentary, just so he can experience the pain and misery in the voices of the pundits and commentators.
Published viewing figures suggest he is not alone in this form of football schadenfreude. Take the 2010 World Cup semi-final between Germany and Spain. Van Dijk and his colleagues describe how when Carles Puyol scored his goal in the 73rd minute, more than 100,000 Dutch viewers switched to a German channel. Just before the end of the match, when Germany’s defeat was imminent, the Dutch audience watching the German coverage peaked at 352,000. The researchers suggested that these viewers wanted to hear the German commentators suffer as they described their national team’s defeat.
Other fans have had electrodes attached to their faces, revealing how broadly and automatically we grin and smile when a minor tragedy befalls a rival team. The participants that time, for a 2015 study, were German football fans. They watched penalties being taken by German players and Dutch players while electrodes were attached to key parts of their faces, measuring the magnitude and speed of their facial expressions. Crucially, the penalties did not involve both teams at the same time. In other words, when the Dutch missed a penalty, there was no advantage to the German team. But the researchers found that facial muscle reactions were stronger when the Dutch missed a penalty compared to when Germans scored. This contradicted what the German fans told researchers they preferred subjectively. Their faces were betraying them.
Understanding the psychological machinery made me feel a little less ashamed of my initial reaction to the suffering of City fans. And was it so bad, anyway? Who was being harmed?
A hallmark of schadenfreude is that it is passive; it is a pleasure from suffering we haven’t caused ourselves. But how easily can it tip into something less benign?
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I remembered that as well as feeling joy at the suffering of Man City, I had actually taken an active part in some social media goading of City fans. I had added laughing face emojis to cruel tweets directed at bereft supporters.
Research by Harvard psychologist Mina Cikara suggests that enjoying a rival’s misfortune may not be entirely harmless. She suggests that humans are social creatures who don’t actually like harming other people. She cites as one example accounts of soldiers in World War I deliberately firing over the heads of their enemies. She suggests that schadenfreude could become a training camp that rewards outgroup pain with pleasure. Repeatedly reinforcing that association may make it easier to harm an enemy ourselves: We’ve done the practice first.
What have I learned? I’ve learned to have compassion for this whole schadenfreude process in my primitive human brain. But I must also remember how easily passive joy in the suffering of others can tip into something more destructive. That is human too, but I do have a choice.
Find more in my book, Till I Die: Why Football Means Everything (even when it shouldn’t), longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2026.