When Soccer Drives You Round the Bend
If you are an avid soccer fan, then you’ll be well aware of all the tense, nail-biting feelings that mysteriously occur when your team has a match. You’re in the dying minutes, your strikers have missed chance after chance, and the opposition is now threatening with a counter attack. As they pile on the pressure your club is hanging on by the skin of its teeth, you experience all the nerves of the world stacked onto your shoulders, and you are quite literally on the edge of your seat.
Well maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, but you know the phenomenon I’m talking about: anxiety over results has weighed down on many a soccer fan for generations.
And apparently this experience has a name: final score syndrome. It’s a common affliction which has recently been researched in relation to the impact of listening to soccer whilst driving. The study was conducted by the insurance company MORE TH>N.
They found that 7 million UK soccer fans suffer increased heart rate, decreased concentration levels, sweaty hands, and mild nausea when listening to matches on the radio. Yes, this is when soccer literally drives you round the bend!
As The Bolton News reports, Bolton Wanderers are one of the clubs chiefly responsible for this phenomenon in the UK. Indeed, 54% of the club’s fans suffer the kind of symptoms described above, being beaten only by Chelsea, Wigan Athletic and Birmingham City. Perhaps this reflects on the attachment of these fans to their clubs, or perhaps the teams too often leave it till the last minute to score and thus leave the listeners in limbo.
The condition is particularly dangerous when you are driving because a slip in concentration can have such serious consequences. As Yahoo reported, it is often the gut-wrenching late goals that are most to blame. According to Peter Markey of More Than, 500,000 people have had or nearly had a minor accident. Meanwhile a recent test on a Liverpool soccer fan showed a series of potentially hazardous mistakes whilst driving.
`
`
And it’s not just in the UK that this is a problem – soccer has truly become a global passion. It’s made especially relevant today with the UK Premier League coming to a close tomorrow for 2010. It is toss up between Chelsea and Manchester United, with the former in the stronger position. It’s a tense time, so try not to let the score drive you mad if it doesn’t go according to plan (easier said than done I admit). For the rest of us, there is always the FIFA 2010 World Cup to start getting anxious about!
With this research MORE TH>N have clearly unmasked and defined a long-standing issue that you had probably taken for granted. So thanks go to them and to the people at the Rabbit Agency for getting the word out.
But all this begs the question: if we stop listening to soccer do we get a big discount on our car insurance?
Have fun,
Soccer Geek
P.S: Do you have any suggested steps to reduce the stress associated with final score syndrome?
[...] Final Score Syndrome: When Soccer Drives You Round the Bend … [...]