Why Do We Naturally Support the Underdog in Sports?

G'day Bulb! Why do we love an underdog? That's the little guy who comes up against a big powerhouse. Think Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Vasilyevich Drago. Or The Mighty Ducks. They're the unfavoured ones battling against all the odds. Everyone wants to see the underdog rise and triumph against the favourites.

We all typically root for the little guy in sports. Why is that? Do we like rebelling against the authority? Is it part of us being on the side of resistance? Or do we just enjoy suffering likely defeat?

Well an Indiana University professor named Edward Hirt did a study in 1992 where participants watched their favourite basketball team play. The results linked their either team winning or losing with participants self esteem, to the point that participants saw themselves as more sexually desirable when their team won.

So what about for casual fans who don't have a particular allegiance to a favourite team? Or when your favourite team is no longer in contention and you're going for your "second" team?

A year before Hirt's study, researchers at the Bowling Green State University published a paper called "the underdog concept in sport". They demonstrated that 81% of people in the study chose the underdog in a hypothetical sports match-up. When the underdog won a game, half of the 81% of people who originally wanted the underdog to win, then switched allegiance and wanted the original favourites to win.

So why are we then so attracted to the underdog?

To begin with, most of us can naturally relate to underdogs. Life is mostly an uphill battle with many losses and we need to make with what we've got. There's a little big of underdog in all of us then. When an underdog wins, we suddenly feel there is a little bit more fairness in the world.

When I take a look at one of the biggest upsets in history, Super Bowl XLII, this is a perfect example where we revel in the fact that an underdog won.

When the Giants won, we all suddenly saw a bit more fairness in the world. The concept of "Schadenfreude" then comes to play. It's a loan word from the German language which is unconsciously taking pleasure from the misfortunes of others. Because those misfortunes are those of a Goliath, the Patriots in this case, we draw huge pleasure.

You really only go for the Patriots if you live in New England or if you're a glory hunter. The Giants came into the Super Bowl as 12-point underdogs, were a wild card team and against a Patriots side that were undefeated the entire season up to that point. No Wild Card team had ever won a Super Bowl to that point. You can't get much more underdog than that.

The Patriots-Brady era is also one of the biggest dynasties of all-time and anyone who isn't a Pats fan will feel the unfairness in that. We all feel a little bit envious too. I mean, who wouldn't want their own team to have a dynasty like New England's?

Another of my favourite underdog sports moments is without a doubt Leicester City's 2015-16 Premier League miracle. The club were 5,000-to-1 odds of winning the title and somehow they did it. I was absolutely delighted that an underdog could knock off big teams like Manchester United, Manchester City and Arsenal to win the unlikely. Again, there's the envious side of our human nature.

But then we also take pleasure in the fact that Leicester were not expected to succeed and because they did, it's a feel good story for us. Deep down as humans we naturally go for the underdog because we also feel that they need us. Perhaps we subconsciously feel that we willed them on to victory and that they couldn't have done it without us.

An underdog win also gives us some hope. That anything, and I mean anything is possible. If Leicester won the Premier League at 5000-1 odds, why can't our Sunday league football team do it too?

To sum it up, we love an underdog. We can all relate in life to how it feels like to be an underdog. When an underdog wins, the world suddenly feels fair again. All that envy disappears while we get to enjoy our win, until reality is restored again.

So next time an underdog wins, take a step back, enjoy it, and embrace the moment.

Wolfgang Sport has reached BULB! An American sports blog bringing you content on football, basketball, baseball, soccer and more, we continue to push the boundaries of blogging in the crypto world and embracing Web3 technologies.