What do sporting upsets tell us about why we love sports?

On the face of it, the Netherlands' victory over South Africa at the Cricket World Cup in India was just another result from just another sport.

In the modern era of professional sports, the endless list of matches and competitions being contested across the world can mean results become just another post to scroll past on social media timelines everywhere. The meaning of another result does not extend beyond the impact it has on the win or loss column, before attention switches to the next game.

But we're missing the best part, because results such as these are worth savoring. A victory for the lowest-ranked team at a tournament against a traditional behemoth of a sport is a rarity in any discipline, let alone at a World Cup, and even less so in cricket.

That the Dutch win over the South Africans came just days after the second-lowest ranked team, Afghanistan, beat defending champions England, is even more remarkable.

Sporting context

All sporting upsets have their own remarkable background, and the Afghan triumph was no different.

In the face of political turmoil back home following the Taliban's return to power in 2021, Afghanistan's sports teams have faced an uphill battle to compete. The women's cricket team has been disbanded, female Afghan athletes at the recent Asian Games were all based abroad. And not long after the men's Cricket World Cup had started, the country experienced a 6.3 magnitude earthquake and after-tremors that claimed at least 1,000 lives.

Man of the match, bowler Mujeeb Ur Rahman, dedicated the victory to those who had been affected.

But for cricket fans not already cheering Afghanistan, what does their victory mean? Is it possible to find meaning beyond the individual context of each team?

Daniel Wann of Murray State University in Kentucky, USA, is one of the few experts in the psychology of fan support. Speaking to Eric Simons in the Colombia Journalism Review, Wann revealed eight motivations behind people's love of sport: self-esteem benefits, money might be involved, friends or family like sports, excitement, visually pleasing, escape from the real world, a sense of belonging and a place for emotional expression.

Ultimately, as Simons points out: "There is no single answer to why people watch sports, because the answer doesn't lie in the game, it lies inside the individual."

The mirror neurons in our brains that allow us to put ourselves in other people's shoes also play a role in how we watch sports, but they do not account for why you might favor one team over another.

The underdog

But the interest around the underdog, the upset, the unexpected, is perhaps easier to explain more broadly. From the rewarding feeling of watching a team do something they don't do often (namely win) to subconscious Schadenfreude, many theories have been discussed and researched as to why people enjoy cheering on an underdog.

Nadav Goldschmied, Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of San Diego, believes the most compelling argument is a desire for fairness.

"I think that we intuitively assign the underdog, the lesser resources, the lesser opportunities, so when a label is assigned, like an underdog and a favorite, we immediately also assume that side from the relationship. We think that the underdogs did not have the same opportunities, and I think that we have kind of a sense of fairness to lend our support and try to make the world a more fair place," Goldschmied said in an interview with the award-winning student newspaper, The Science Survey.

Fair game

Admittedly, in many modern sports, fairness is a concept that is becoming harder to believe in. In English football, for example, ownership in a capitalist economy has tilted the scales in favor of a handful of teams and opened a side door to political power, the combination of which leaves little room for underdogs or upsets.

Opposition to the proposed European Super League in 2001 was based partly on objection to the idea of a closed shop for the biggest names only.

The governing body of rugby, World Rugby, gives disproportionate amounts of funding to its members, leaving the established elite playing a different game than the rest.

A similar story is true in cricket, and the top-heavy nature of tennis means many pros struggle to make it to the courts in a competitive state.

That's why the victories of the Netherlands and Afghanistan matter more than ever. In some small way, they make us feel like a little fairness has been dealt out in a sporting landscape that is increasingly uneven.

Perhaps more than anything though, they remind us why watching sport is so compelling: because you still never know who is going to win.

Edited by Matt Ford