Soccernomics (33 page)

Inevitably, at one point in the memoir, Exley contemplates suicide.

He has convinced himself he has lung cancer. Determined to avoid the suffering his father went through, he decides to kill himself instead. Drinking with strangers in bars, he gets into the habit of working “the conversation round to suicide,” and soliciting their views on how best to do it. The strangers are happy to oblige: “Such was the clinical and speculative enthusiasm for the subject—‘Now, if I was gonna knock myself off . . . ’—that I came to see suicide occupying a greater piece of the American consciousness than I had theretofore imagined.”

Only one thing keeps Exley going. The Giants are “a life-giving, an exalting force.” He is “unable to conceive what [his] life would have been without football to cushion the knocks.” The real-life Frederick Exley lived to the age of sixty-three, dying in 1992 after suffering a stroke alone in his apartment. He might never have gotten that old without the Giants.

There may be a great many Exleys around. The viewing figures we saw earlier in the book suggest that sport is the most important communal activity in many people’s lives. Nearly a third of Americans watch the Super Bowl. However, European soccer is even more popular. In the 228

Netherlands, possibly the European country that follows its national team most eagerly, three-quarters of the population watch Holland’s biggest soccer games. In many European countries, World Cups may now be the greatest shared events of any kind. To cap it all, World Cups mostly take place in June, the peak month for suicides in the Northern Hemisphere. How many Exleys have been saved from jumping off apartment buildings by international soccer tournaments, the world’s biggest sporting events?

This is not just a rhetorical question. A study of soccer tournaments and suicide would bring together both an incomparably compelling communal event and a sample the size of several countries. So we set about finding the data.

We needed suicide statistics per month over several years for as many European countries as possible. These figures do not seem to be published anywhere. Luckily, we found out that the Greek epidemiologists Eleni Petridou and Fotis Papadapoulos had laboriously gotten hold of these data years earlier by writing to the statistical offices of several countries. A statistician who works with Petridou and Papadapoulos, Nick Dessypris, went through the numbers for us. He found that in almost every country for which he had numbers, fewer people kill themselves while the national team is playing in a World Cup or a European championship. Dessypris said the declines were “statistically significant”—unlikely to be due to chance.

Let’s take Germany, the biggest country in our study and one that always qualifies for big tournaments. Petridou and Papadapoulos had obtained monthly suicide data for Germany from 1991 through 1997.

A horrifying total of 90,000 people in Germany officially killed themselves in this period. The peak months for suicides were March through June.

But when Germany was playing in a soccer tournament—as it did in the Junes of 1992, 1994, and 1996—fewer people died. In the average June with soccer, there were 787 male and 329 female suicides in Germany. A lot more people killed themselves in the Junes of 1991, 1993, A F A N ’ S S U I C I D E N O T E S

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1995, and 1997 when Germany was not playing soccer. In those soccer-free Junes, there was an average of 817 male and 343 female suicides, or 30 more dead men and 14 more dead women than in the average June with a big tournament. For both German men and women, the June with the fewest suicides in our seven-year sample was 1996, the month that Germany won Euro ’96.

We found the same trend for ten of the twelve countries we studied.

In Junes when the country was playing in a soccer tournament, there were fewer suicides. These declines are particularly remarkable given how much alcohol is consumed during soccer tournaments, because drinking would normally be expected to help prompt suicides. Only in the Netherlands and Switzerland did soccer tournaments not seem to save lives; these two countries saw very slight increases in the suicide rate during tournaments. In the other countries, the lifesaving effect of soccer was sometimes spectacular. Our data for Norway, for instance, run from 1988 through 1995. The most soccer-mad country in Europe played in only one tournament in that period, the World Cup of 1994.

The average for the seven Junes when Norway was not playing soccer was 55 suicides. But in June 1994 there were only 36 Norwegian suicides, by far the lowest figure for all eight Junes in our data set. Or take Denmark, for which we have suicide tallies from 1973 through 1996, the longest period for any country. In June 1992 the Danes won the European championship. That month there were 54 male suicides, the fewest for any June since 1978, and 28 female suicides, the joint lowest (with 1991) since the data set began.

We have tried to make some very rough estimates of how many lives these tournaments saved in each country. “Lives saved” represents the decline in deaths during the average June when a country’s national team is playing in a World Cup or European championship compared to the average June when the team isn’t playing. Figure 11.1 shows the tally. The figures are negative for the Netherlands and Switzerland because more people killed themselves when their teams were playing than when there was no soccer.

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F I G U R E 1 1 . 1
Deaths during World Cup compared to average June
Male lives saved

Female lives saved

Austria

-3

Czech Republic

14

Denmark

4

France

59

Germany

30

14

Greece

5

Ireland

1

Netherlands

-5

Norwaya

[19 lives saved spread across both genders]

Spain

1

Sweden

15

Switzerland

-1

-2

aThe data for Norway were not broken down by gender.

The next question is what happens after a team is knocked out. Do all the people who had been saved from suicide by soccer then fall into a void and jump off apartment buildings? If so, you would expect a rise in suicides in the period after the tournament.

However, we found that in ten of our twelve countries, suicides
declined
for the entire year when the national team played in a big tournament. Only in the Netherlands did suicides rise in the year when the team played; in Spain the difference was negligible. But in the other ten countries, even after the team got knocked out and the euphoria ended, there was no compensating rise in suicide. To the contrary: it seems that the uniting effect of the tournament lasted for a while afterward, continuing to depress the suicide rate. For each of these ten countries, more lives were saved on average over the entire year than in June alone. Figure 11.2 contains our very rough estimates for lives saved over the entire year when the national team plays in a tournament (“lives saved” represents the decline in deaths during a “soccer”

year compared to the average year). Very roughly, soccer tournaments in these periods appear to have helped save several hundred Europeans from suicide.

A F A N ’ S S U I C I D E N O T E S

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F I G U R E 1 1 . 2
Lives saved by gender in “soccer” years
Male lives saved

Female lives saved

Austria

46

15

Czech Republic

55

12

Denmark

37

47

France

95

82

Germany

61

39

Greece

13

Ireland

19

-10

Netherlands

-10

-1

Norway

[92 lives saved spread across both genders]

Spain

-3

Sweden

44

16

Switzerland

20

We couldn’t find any monthly suicide data for any of the British nations. However, the only two previous studies on this topic that we know of in Britain suggest that the lifesaving effect works there, too.

“Parasuicide” is a suicidal gesture in which the aim is not death but rather self-harm, or a cry for help. One example of parasuicide is taking an insufficient overdose. George Masterton, a psychiatrist in Edinburgh, and his coauthor J. A. Strachan studied Scottish parasuicides during and immediately after the World Cups of 1974, 1978, 1982, and 1986. Each time, Scotland had qualified for the tournament. Each time, Masterton and Strachan found a fall in parasuicide for both genders during the tournament that “has been sustained for at least eight weeks after the last game.” The Scottish case is a pretty strong piece of evidence against the apartment-building theory of soccer suicides, because if there was ever an excuse for soccer fans to try to kill themselves, it was Scotland’s performance at the World Cup of 1978. (Their fantasist manager, Ally McLeod, had boasted beforehand that they would leave with a “medal of some sort.”)

Later Masterton and Anthony J. Mander studied the numbers of people who came to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital with psychiatric 232

emergencies during and after the World Cups of 1978, 1982, and 1986. The researchers found “reductions in all illness categories during and afterwards (with the exception of alcoholism during).” The decline in emergencies applied to both genders, and was more marked after each World Cup than during it. For instance, there was a 56 percent fall in admissions of male neurotics in the weeks after a tournament.

The authors then tried to explain what was going on here:

There are few outlets which permit a wide and acceptable expression of Scottish nationhood—sport is perhaps the most powerful, and

[soccer] is the national game. . . . We would speculate that such a common interest and endeavour, fused with a surge of nationalism, might enhance social cohesion in the manner proposed by Durkheim to explain the decreased suicide rates that accompany times of war.

Social cohesion
is the key phrase here. This is the benefit that almost all fans—potential suicides and the rest of us—get from fandom. Winning or losing is not the point. It is not the case that losing matches makes significant numbers of people so unhappy they jump off apartment buildings. In the US, fans of longtime losers like the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox baseball teams have not killed themselves more than other people, says Thomas Joiner, author of
Why People Die by Suicide
, whose own father died by suicide.

Joiner’s article “On Buckeyes, Gators, Super Bowl Sunday, and the Miracle on Ice” makes a strong case that it’s not the winning that counts but the taking part—the shared experience. It is true that he found fewer suicides in Columbus, Ohio, and Gainesville, Florida, in the years when the local college football teams did well. But Joiner argues that this is because fans of winning teams “pull together”

more: they wear the team shirt more often, watch games together in bars, talk about the team, and so on, much as happens in a European A F A N ’ S S U I C I D E N O T E S

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country while the national team is playing in a World Cup. The

“pulling together” saves people from suicide, not the winning. Proof of this is that Joiner found fewer suicides in the US on Super Bowl Sundays than on other Sundays at that time of year, even though few of the Americans who watch the Super Bowl are passionate supporters of either team. What they get from the day’s parties is a sense of belonging.

That is the lifesaver. In Europe today, there may be nothing that brings a society together like a World Cup with your team in it. For once, almost everyone in the country is watching the same TV programs and talking about them at work the next day, just as people used to do thirty years ago before cable TV arrived. Part of the point of watching a World Cup is that almost everyone else is watching, too.

Isolated people—the types at most risk of suicide—are suddenly welcomed into the national conversation. They are given social cohesion.

All this helps explain why big soccer tournaments seem to save so many female lives in Europe, even though relatively few women either commit suicide or (before about 2000 at least) watch soccer. The “pulling together” during a big soccer tournament is so universal that it drags many women along in a way that club soccer does not. It may also be that during tournaments, some troubled women benefit from a brief vacation from male partners who are distracted by soccer.

Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity. Most strikingly, in the week after John F. Kennedy’s murder in 1963—a time of American sadness but also of “pulling together”—
not one
suicide was reported in twenty-nine cities studied.

Likewise, in the US in the days after the September 11 attacks, another phase of national “pulling together,” the number of calls to the 1-800-SUICIDE hotline halved to about three hundred a day, “an all-time low,” writes Joiner. And in Britain in 1997, suicides declined after Princess Diana died.

Joiner speculates that “pulling together” through sports may particularly suit “individuals who have poor interpersonal skills (often characteristic 234

of severely depressed or suicidal persons).” You don’t have to be charming to be a fan among fans.

In 1956 Frederick Exley was drunk, unemployed, and loveless in Chicago. He writes, “Though I had completely disregarded football my first year in that happy city, during the autumn of 1956, after losing my job, I once again found that it was the only thing that gave me comfort.”

At some point or other in life, we have all known how that feels.

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HAPPINESS

Why Hosting a World Cup

Is Good for You

In the 1920s, the belief arose in the poor black Transkei region of South Africa that black Americans were going to arrive in airplanes to destroy the white men and save the chosen. This was supposed to happen in 1927.

Today in South Africa you can find a similar belief: that in 2010 the rich people of the world will arrive in airplanes and save the whole nation. On the day in May 2004 that South Africa was awarded the World Cup, locals celebrating in Soweto shouted, “The money is coming!”