♪His name is Rio and he watches from the stands♪
was how football fans greeted Rio Ferdinand
when he was banned for missing a drugs test.
Some football chants are made up on the spot,
some have echoed around the same grounds for generations.
But scientists think they are a practice
that has deep roots in human culture.
Every social group ever studied, from the Maori Hakka
to the Sufi Whirling Dervishes
to awkward British people at a wedding,
engages in some form of group singing, dancing, and chanting.
Why is this?
Psychologists have found
that when a group of people engage in collective behaviour -
like chanting -
it has a profound effect on how they think and feel.
Group singing's been shown to have a powerful effect
on the mood of depressed people.
As well as the uplifting music,
it seems that synchronising your breathing,
heartrate and voice with other people
has the remarkable effect of making us feel connected to one another.
But of course football fans don't usually feel connected
to everyone in the stadium.
There are plenty of examples of football chants that are rude,
offensive, even racist or homophobic.
Though they've historically been a means to abuse players
and referees,
they can also endorse more positive values
like celebrating striker Mo Salah's goals with,
♪If he scores another few then I'll be Muslim, too♪
Collective behaviour like chanting is, more than anything,
a way to express social identity and the values of that group.
Like the Liverpool fans chanting, "Justice for the 96"
in support of the Hillsborough disaster victims.
Chanting at a football match doesn’t just bond a group together
in love and harmony,
there is a dark side to coordinated behaviour.
Most armies around the world march up and down in parades.
For the past 100 years,
at least since the invention of the machine gun,
it's been a bad idea to walk slowly towards the enemy in a straight line.
So why do soldiers march and chant together?
In one experiment,
people were asked to put a jar of live woodlice into a grinder.
The people who had marched in unison around the car park beforehand
threw about 50% more of the bugs into the grinder
than those who had walked the same distance
but not in a coordinated march.
Please note there was actually an escape chute in the grinder
and every bug escaped unharmed.
This suggests coordinated behaviours
can lower people's sense of personal autonomy,
and make them more likely to be obedient to aggressive action.
And there is a final reason that people might chant
at a football match.
Writing has only been around for a few thousand years,
but we find chants and songs in every pre-literate culture.
Even today in India,
it's the chanted version of Vedic texts
that's seen as the definitive version, not the written form.
Perhaps chanting is a call back to those older practises of encoding
and sharing cultural knowledge.
So next time you hear a thousand people yelling...
to the referee,
remember that it's because they're bonding with each other,
affirming their social identity
and using an ancient technology to record knowledge.
And, perhaps, because the referee doesn’t know what he's doing.
Thanks for watching! :)
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