It’s not just psychological: When your favorite team wins a game, you may actually profit.
“SPORTS, WE KNOW, are big business. The Red Sox are worth more than $800 million, the Patriots at least a billion. China spent more than $40 billion to host the just-completed Olympics, an event dedicated, at least in theory, to showcasing the spirit of amateur athletic achievement.
“Even for the individual fan, the price can be high, whether it’s measured in money, time, or lost sleep. A good seat at Gillette Stadium can run you $169; an NBA season is hundreds of hours of basketball. And then there are the hours spent Monday-morning quarterbacking, the sums lost in office betting pools, the money spent on replica jerseys and commemorative beach towels, the time spent crafting taunting e-mails and the time spent responding to them.
“With costs like these, it’s inevitable that people will, from time to time, ask what sort of return they get on their investment. Sure, there are the occasional moments of euphoria, the feeling of boozy comradeship we feel toward strangers at sports bars, but is there, perhaps, anything more concrete? …
“But a few scholars have started to suggest that there may indeed be another kind of benefit from big-time sports. There’s a catch, though: the team has to be good. In a forthcoming paper, economist Michael Davis and the psychologist Christian End say that having a winning NFL football team increases the incomes of the people who live and work in its hometown by as much as $120 a year. And while the study doesn’t identify exactly what causes the boost, the authors point to psychological literature suggesting that winning fans are at once harder workers and bigger spenders. In short, buoyed by the team’s success, we work longer hours, take bigger risks, and shop more avidly, all of which helps the local economy.
” ‘This collective mass of people in a good mood, that is something that could really bolster the economy,’ says End, an assistant professor of psychology at Xavier University. …”