Football, and happiness

Here at IC Towers, we've been wondering what are the best and worst teams to support, from the point of view of maximizing happiness?
The natural answer - Arsenal - won't do. Sure, they play the best football. But this is  offset by the fact that it's hard to get tickets, and when you do, you're surrounded by tourists. And tourists have no more business being at football grounds than women or the middle classes. By contrast, fans of smaller teams get to have a laugh with their mates, and get  the civic pride of supporting  their local team and not being glory hunters.
This leaves two theories.
1. People adapt to their circumstances. This predicts that the happiest fans will be those doing well relative to the recent past - Watford, West Brom, Man City - whilst the unhappiest will be those doing badly - S****s, Sheffield United.
2. Memory matters. My Evertonian colleagues seem happy enough, even though they last won the league 20 years ago. And Paul rarely shuts up about Forest's European Cup  wins. This suggests that the memory of good times can tide us over lean periods; it's not too bad to live in the ruins of an empire.
The thing is, these two theories conflict. If Forest and Everton fans take pride in the glories of 20-30 years ago, shouldn't S***s fans take comfort from the relative success of the last couple of seasons? But this seems not to happen, suggesting a non-linear relationship between past happiness and present happiness. Does this generalize outside football?
As the answer to the original question, how about Newcastle as the worst team to support? They don't have any glorious history, at least in living non-fictitious memory. And yet their fans seem never to have adapted to their team's mediocrity.

Comments

[Will Davies]

Chris - rational choice utilitarianism will miss one of the key idiosyncrasies of following football: people enjoy the unhappiness. Even at the Arsenal occasionally, there's nothing some fans enjoy more than a good whinge.

Perhaps we need to consider Erving Goffman here. The happiness/unhappiness of football is almost-but-not-quite bracketted from the happiness/unhappiness of 'real life'. It is a separate, 'framed' realm of success and failure, that we let bleed into 'real life'.

I think there is some comfort taken in having more than one domain of success and failure in life. Even when we fail in that separate domain, there is something heartening that not all our eggs are in one basket (which would otherwise be capitalism... although quite how separate that is from football these days is a moot point).

[Scratch]

"And tourists have no more business being at football grounds than women or the middle classes."

That's a terrible thing to say...women are perfectly welcome at the footer.

Evertonians tend to be happy enough because by and large we just ain't that arsed.
The searing, inextinguishable greatness of our history doesn't hurt either.

[Buenaventura MacLean]

Two words: East Stirlingshire.

[cityunslicker]

Don't take it all out on Newcastle just because it has destroyed the credibility of the Government.....

[Matt Munro]

I refuse to belive that anyone would support Watford out of anthing other than desperation.

[alan doesn't dunk crisps in beer]

As with life, happiness is to do with expectation and ownership.

Fulham's happiest season was the (old) Third division promotion season under Micky Adams (ten years ago) because we'd had 20 years of decline and there were only 5,000 of us and the players were real people.

A seated corporate who-is-that-millionaire-french-journeyman, mid table premier league hyped nonsense bares no comparison.

But then everything is less fun as you get older.

And football isn't about happiness it's about identity and place.

[Ken Houghton]

More importantly, will anyone in the league propose new rules limiting the number of non-English coaches?

(http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=490735&campaign=rss&source=ESPNHeadlines&cc=5901)