The Ugliest Truth Behind The Beautiful Game
Part II of III
In ‘The Ugly Truth Behind the Beautiful Game‘, I explored how sports entertainment cognitively cucks you. But it’s not just your cognitive attention that’s hijacked when you watch a sports game.
Your nervous system is being hijacked.
In any given sports competition, one team wins, and every other team loses. For example, in a 20-club football league, nineteen sets of fans end the season in some hue of disappointment. Didn’t make the 2nd spot. Didn’t win the league. Didn’t get this. Or just got in.
And if your club hasn’t won the title in x number of years, you’ve endured roughly x years of net loss, laced with occasional highs interspersed just frequently enough to keep you hooked.
This is not an accident of the sport.
This is the product.
The hope that your team/player will win is the trap.
The up/down cycle is the mechanism. And it is disgustingly elegant.
What keeps millions of us emotionally hostage is the oscillation. The comeback. The injury-time equaliser. The heartbreaking final. The near-miss that almost makes the loss feel earned. You are not watching a sport.
You are watching a circus designed to take your attention away from the Epstein class. De votre raison d’être. And your expanded potential mind-state.
You are being administered a controlled substance. The dosage is calibrated so you never get enough to feel satisfied. And never so little that you walk away.
The dealer needs you to be functional enough... to keep watching.
If that wasn’t disturbing enough, here is the part that should genuinely disturb you. Through sustained tribal identification with a sports team or player, your nervous system stops belonging to you, at least temporarily.
Your cortisol, your dopamine, your emotional baseline - all of it becomes entangled with a commercial entity wrapped in a bright colour whose statistical fate is to lose more than it wins.
This is not a metaphor. This is, unfortunately, a fact. Walk into any pub on a Sunday morning after a loss and watch the body language. Shoulders down, voices flat. These men didn’t lose anything. Their team did. But the nervous system doesn’t make that distinction. After years of tribal identification, it has stopped trying to.
Researchers (Bernhardt et al., 1998) studying sports fans have documented measurable hormonal shifts that track game outcomes directly, with testosterone dropping after defeats. You are physiologically mirroring a parasitic commercial entity with a losing record, tethering yourself - call it quantum entanglement, call it sympathetic resonance - to a signal that is, by design, net negative.
The zero-sum frame is the quieter poison.
Perhaps you think that by tying yourself to the winners like Real Madrid, Lamine Yamal, LeBron James, Lionel Messi, etc., you’re doing the reverse. But they lose too. And when they win, you’re just outsourcing your own desire for heroism, which will put you in the frame of a 3rd person character in another athlete/team’s journey. You’re the witness. The extra in someone else’s film. You still don’t own the signal. You’re renting it from people who have never heard of you and will never meet you.
Think about what this does over a decade. Or lifetime. Their peak years become your peak years by proxy. Their retirement becomes your quiet grief. Meanwhile, the people who actually share your life get what’s left of you after all the games. This is the quiet demotion. You stop being the protagonist of your own story.
The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between vicarious victory and your own. But the ledger of your life does. And the Epstein class? They understand this perfectly. They don’t watch other men be great. They fund the stadium. They own the broadcast rights. They sit in the box seat while you stand in the terrace.
The real question is, what frequency signal do you want to run on?
A sports circus designed to emotionally entangle you?
Or something deeper?
I love ALL your posts...Not sure how I found them but I'm so glad I did!!! It's amazing how this is all true and over so many years, people(men in general sorry) have never realized or seen how the game ( sports) effect their lives period!!! I have just recently started watching sports( football mostly) and emidiatly see, how rigged these games are. It's not even the fun of just watching sports anymore. Even the freaking referee cheats on their calls. The men I watch it with to tell me I'm crazy for seeing all the messed up calls....This game can't be rigged( oh ok).... Anyways, thanks for your posts. It's kind of interesting to me, how in my life, I find what I need to read, exactly when I need to read it!! It's actually universally crazy to me and gives me goosebumps and all that when I think about it....
Thanks again.