Is your ill fate bad luck or a curse? You could ask Ted Lasso, but why not consider the psychology

As the new season of Ted Lasso started, I was reminded of one of the show’s stranger storylines. When Dani “Football is life!” Rojas gets injured, his teammates blame the incident on a curse said to haunt the treatment room.

Absurd? Perhaps. But sports curses aren’t just fictional plot devices. Football is fertile ground for stories of mysterious forces, blamed for everything from missed penalties to decades of failure.

Take Mayo’s Gaelic football team. After they won the All-Ireland title in 1951, the story goes that a local priest cursed them, declaring they would not win another final until every member of that team had died. Over the next 75 years, Mayo reached 11 more finals – and lost them all. Paddy Prendergast, the last surviving member of the 1951 squad, died in 2021. Then Mayo made it to the final again last month and won. This prompted the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, who has family ties to Mayo, to announce on X: “The curse is broken.”

Birmingham City – a team close to my heart – has its own curse story. The club is said to have endured decades of disappointment after a 100-year hex was placed on its home ground in 1906. And this year, Harry Kane missed a close-range chance in England’s Fifa World Cup match against Ghana, shortly after a “witch-doctor” claimed to have cast a spell on him. Coincidence?

There are, of course, many possible explanations. Maybe supernatural forces really were at work. Maybe the teams had bad luck, made tactical errors or were simply beaten by better opponents. Or maybe, once the curse became part of the team’s folklore, it acquired a life of its own. In this scenario, it doesn’t matter whether the “spells” were ever cast, or whether players personally believed in them. What matters is that the idea gained a cultural foothold. Retold by fans, journalists and commentators, the stories shaped expectations about what might happen next. And expectations can have very real effects.

Psychology has a name for the power of negative expectations: the nocebo effect. The phenomenon is best known in medicine. A person takes a placebo pill but is warned it may cause side-effects. Often, they experience them anyway. The symptoms are real, even though the tablet isn’t causing them. The same principle can play out in sport. Philip Hurst and colleagues at Canterbury Christ Church University have shown that when runners are given an inert supplement but told it will negatively affect their sprint performance, they run slower. Give them the same supplement but tell them it will improve their performance, it has little effect. This hints that in sport, negative expectations may have more of an impact than positive ones.

Now, imagine a football player walking on to the pitch. The trigger hardly matters. A “curse”, a run of defeats or a teammate’s throwaway comment can all plant a seed of doubt. After that, every misplaced pass, heavy touch or missed chance can seem like proof that something is off. Confidence falters. A game that once felt instinctive becomes something to overthink, until doubt itself starts to undermine performance.

What begins in one player’s mind can also become a team-wide narrative. Players absorb cues from team members, supporters, critics and the media, quietly internalising the atmosphere that surrounds a team. Psychologists call this social contagion: the spread of emotions, behaviours and beliefs through groups. Over time, these shared beliefs can become part of a team’s identity, shaping how it responds under pressure. The result is a feedback loop: the story shapes expectations, expectations shape behaviour, and behaviour can appear to confirm the original story. The question is: how do you break the cycle?

Perhaps we can learn a thing or two from Ted Lasso and the real-life managers who faced similar scenarios. Lasso’s solution was a late-night cleansing ritual, with players throwing treasured possessions into a container which he set alight. Meanwhile Birmingham City’s Barry Fry tried a more “fluid” approach, by urinating on the pitch’s four corners.

Whether these rituals had any mystical power is beside the point. Their value was psychological. They created a reset – a chance for the team to draw a line under the past and start expecting a brighter future. For Mayo, that reset has finally arrived. The next generation of players and supporters will inherit a different memory – not of the final they could never win, but of the one they finally did. As former Mayo player Colm Boyle put it after their victory: “The shackles are off.” The curse may only have been a story, but now Mayo can tell a different one.

• Helen Pilcher is a science writer and author of Life Changing: How Humans Are Altering Life on Earth and This Book May Cause Side Effects

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.