Football: An Emotional Valve

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30542, 10 September 1964, Page 19

Football: An Emotional Valve

The West German police magazine, “Die Polizei,” recently published noteworthy contributions on the psychology of the masses. Experienced psychologists who have long worked with the police, reported on their observations at football stadiums.

All authors agreed that a small minority is always to blame for the many riots that break out during football matches. They form the “ignition” to fire the large crowd. This minority is usually made up of young people lacking all understanding for the spirit and meaning of sportive competitions. They

i often gather just to start scandals or brawls. They use the sports grounds as a valve to let off their pent-up energy and emotions. A police psychologist, Mr F. Stiebitz, furthermore believes that three different groups of spectators can be found at today’s football matches. The first group is made up of experts, often sports fans who used actively to participate in sports. They are on the whole immune to “affect actions and possible mass psychoses” as] they learned during their] active sports period how to: control their emotions. i

The second group forms the

exact opposite of the first and is made up of young people who work off their unconscious, deep-down feeling at the sports field. These habitual noisemakers and rowdies have become a “sports plague” all over the world.

But by far the largestgroup is formed by the thousands of spectators—people of all age groups, classes of society, professions and degrees of education—who represent the actual medium for affect behaviour and mass psychoses. They flock to the sports field without really knowing why. According to Professor

Mitscherlich, a West German psychologist, most people today are in the search of “levelling experiences.” The more mechanical, technical and in turn monotonous our daily life becomes, the greater the hunger for exciting personal experiences becomes. Sports competitions also belong to the category that gives us the possibility to mobilise our slumbering and repressed affective feelings in order to “live our life out to the full.” Sports fanaticism, then, is nothing else than the break-ing-through of a suppressed psychic state.—(Reuter)