\u00a0\u00a0\u200b\u200b\u00a0\u00a0\u200bAs the new season of Ted Lasso started, I was reminded of one of the show\u2019s stranger storylines. When Dani \u201cFootball is life!\u201d Rojas gets injured, his teammates blame the incident on a curse said to haunt the treatment room.Absurd? Perhaps. But sports curses aren\u2019t just fictional plot devices. Football is fertile ground for stories of mysterious forces, blamed for everything from missed penalties to decades of failure.Take Mayo\u2019s Gaelic football team. After they won the All-Ireland title in 1951, the story goes that a local priest cursed them, declaring they would not win another final until every member of that team had died. Over the next 75 years, Mayo reached 11 more finals \u2013 and lost them all. Paddy Prendergast, the last surviving member of the 1951 squad, died in 2021. Then Mayo made it to the final again last month and won. This prompted the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, who has family ties to Mayo, to announce on X: \u201cThe curse is broken.\u201dBirmingham City \u2013 a team close to my heart \u2013 has its own curse story. The club is said to have endured decades of disappointment after a 100-year hex was placed on its home ground in 1906. And this year, Harry Kane missed a close-range chance in England\u2019s Fifa World Cup match against Ghana, shortly after a \u201cwitch-doctor\u201d claimed to have cast a spell on him. Coincidence?There are, of course, many possible explanations. Maybe supernatural forces really were at work. Maybe the teams had bad luck, made tactical errors or were simply beaten by better opponents. Or maybe, once the curse became part of the team\u2019s folklore, it acquired a life of its own. In this scenario, it doesn\u2019t matter whether the \u201cspells\u201d were ever cast, or whether players personally believed in them. What matters is that the idea gained a cultural foothold. Retold by fans, journalists and commentators, the stories shaped expectations about what might happen next. And expectations can have very real effects.Psychology has a name for the power of negative expectations: the nocebo effect. The phenomenon is best known in medicine. A person takes a placebo pill but is warned it may cause side-effects. Often, they experience them anyway. The symptoms are real, even though the tablet isn\u2019t causing them. The same principle can play out in sport. Philip Hurst and colleagues at Canterbury Christ Church University have shown that when runners are given an inert supplement but told it will negatively affect their sprint performance, they run slower. Give them the same supplement but tell them it will improve their performance, it has little effect. This hints that in sport, negative expectations may have more of an impact than positive ones.Now, imagine a football player walking on to the pitch. The trigger hardly matters. A \u201ccurse\u201d, a run of defeats or a teammate\u2019s throwaway comment can all plant a seed of doubt. After that, every misplaced pass, heavy touch or missed chance can seem like proof that som\u00a0\u00a0\u200b\u00a0\u00a0\u200b\u00a0\u200b\u200bopinion<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0\u00a0\u200b\u200b\u00a0\u00a0\u200bAs the new season of Ted Lasso started, I was reminded of one of the show\u2019s stranger storylines. When Dani […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154967"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155148,"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154967\/revisions\/155148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aftoforo.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}