Are pre-match rituals more exciting than actual football games? Perhaps scientists ought to ask the fans | David Goldblatt

While heart-rate monitoring has provided us with some evidence, it fails to capture the ineffable nature of match day

A recent study of Brazilian football fans, supporters of Atletico Mineiro, monitored their heart rates before and during a big match and concluded that, a single goal aside, the collective rituals of the day were more emotionally intense than anything else. So going to the football is about more than the football; but we surely knew that anyway? Does the kind of neurophysiological approach take us any further?

In the end this study relied on a very small sample - just 17 fans - and a very particular sample at that; the kind of supporter who shows up more than four hours before a game, and is all-in with the choreographed pre-match rituals of flares, fireworks and singing. Even then, the idea that heart rate is the most useful cipher for emotion is too crude a proposition to capture how we experience the game. This research was done at the final of the Minas Gerais state championships, against their eternal local rivals; I wonder what the results would have looked like from one of Bristol Rovers' tortuous late-season defeats this year? What is the physiological metric for ennui?

David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives. His new book Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency (Mudlark) will be published in August