The Emotional Aftermath of Football: How National Team Performance During the UEFA Men's EURO 2024 Shapes Spectators'...

While socially comparative emotions such as envy and schadenfreude are a pervasive part of people's lives, surprisingly little is known about how large-scale sporting events shape these emotional responses. We address this gap by investigating the UEFA EURO 2024 tournament, which provided a unique ecologically-valid field setting to examine how major competitions and national teams winning (vs. losing) evoke not only joy and happiness, but also intergroup emotions rooted in social comparison. In a multi-wave survey of 952 participants from five different countries (England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland), we measured spectators' happiness, enthusiasm, envy, schadenfreude, and their basking in reflective glory intentions (BIRGing) the day after each national team won versus lost (or drew) their match. Multilevel analyses revealed that match outcomes (win vs. loss vs. draw) shaped participants' emotions, including their happiness, enthusiasm, schadenfreude, envy, and BIRGing intentions-all on the day after their national team's match. Several of these effects were moderated by spectators' football fanship and by the opponent's relative team status (stronger or weaker). The present findings underscore that emotionally charged, group-based reactions during major sporting events mirror deeper intergroup dynamics shaped by team status, social identity, and processes of social comparison.