Sports fans and casual viewers can become obsessed with a good underdog story. But what draws us toward the longshot winners and unlikely success stories?

Guest

Nadav Goldschmied, Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of San Diego. Author of the study “The Underdog Effect: Definition, Limitations, and Motivations. Why Do We Support Those at a Competitive Disadvantage.”

Edward Hirt, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. Director of the Social Psychological Study of Motivation and Performance Laboratory, also known as the HirtLab.

Also Featured

Jill Tucker, Reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti, and one of my favorite moments from this year’s World Cup actually took place back in 2018.

ROBERTO LOPES [TAPE]: It’s crazy. I’m sure, like, many people have heard it before, how I was contacted to play on the national team was through LinkedIn. It was a profile I set up when I was in college many years ago, and the manager at the time, Rui Aguas, he contacted me, sent me a message in Portuguese, which I didn’t understand at the time.

So, due to my ignorance, I ignored it. I just thought it was spam and thought nothing of it. But thankfully, nine months later, he wrote back to me in English, and I understood what the message meant. I apologized so much to him and said, “If the opportunity is still there to play international football for Cape Verde, I’d love to be a part of it.”

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so this is Cape Verde center-back Roberto “Pico” Lopes. And just as the accent tells you, he was born and raised in Ireland. So allow me to translate. His Cape Verdean dad, Carlos, was a cruise ship chef whose boat was docked in Dublin when he met Judy, Lopes’ mother. Lopes grew up loving soccer in Ireland, but never really thought about playing internationally.

And then in 2018, Lopes is 24. He’d been playing part-time in Ireland and working as a mortgage advisor at a bank, and he gets this message on LinkedIn. It’s written in Portuguese, so he just presumes it’s spam and ignores it. Nine months later, he gets another LinkedIn DM, and this time it’s in English. And oh, it happens to be from Rui Aguas, Cape Verde’s then manager, who asks, “Hey, did you get my other message from, like, nine months ago?

I’m scouting for Cape Verde’s national team and wondering if you wanna give it a shot.” Well, Lopes then scrambles back through his DMs, finds the first message, drops it into Google Translate, and discovers that he’d been ignoring an offer to play soccer on the international stage. Just three weeks later, Lopes was on a plane headed to play for Cape Verde in an international friendly against Togo.

I mean, this story is so delightful you cannot make it up, because then seven years later, October 2025, a couple of Africa Cup of Nations tournaments under his belt, Lopes and Cape Verde beat Eswatini to qualify for the World Cup for the first time ever.

(CHEERS)[TAPE] 

CHAKRABARTI: So the ecstatic cheers there from that game. Cape Verde is the second smallest country by population to ever reach the World Cup. They were ranked 64th going into this tournament, and lo and behold, in their first game in Atlanta, they get matched up against number three ranked and current European champions, Spain.

ANNOUNCER [TAPE]: Pedri clipping it in. Cucurella getting in behind to a dangerous area. It’s hooked away. It’s fired just over. Vozinha makes the save.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, the Cape Verde Blue Sharks came ready to play, and Cape Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper, Vozinha, came ready to shut Spain down.

ANNOUNCE [TAPE]: Early cross in. Merino pops straight in the air. Vozinha stays at home. Cucurella heads it right at Vozinha. He’ll take an extra, what, second and a half there to do that. Seventh save of the game.

CHAKRABARTI: Seventh save of the game, which that meant Cape Verde had forced Spain to a wildly unexpected zero-zero draw at the end of the game. And afterwards, Vozinha had his first big media moment.

VOZINHA [TAPE]: I work for all my life for this, for this moment, for this dream.

CHAKRABARTI: And the underdogs’ run kept going. Just six days later, they were put up against Uruguay in Miami, and that’s where Cape Verde scored its first ever goal in the World Cup.

ANNOUNCER [TAPE]: This from about 35 or so yards away. Backing it up, Lopes. Driven instead! Whoa! Cape Verde with a stunner! Pina and others celebrate.

CHAKRABARTI: You can really hear the thrill and even the shock of the crowd. Well, in the next game, Cape Verde then forces Saudi Arabia to a draw, and that allows them to advance into the knockout stage of the World Cup, the smallest country by population to ever make it out of group play in the men’s World Cup.

Oof. And in the knockout, Cape Verde faces off against none other than Lionel Messi and Argentina. But we’re gonna get to that game and what happened a little later in the show. My point for right now is that Cape Verde’s story has captured the hearts of millions of soccer fans worldwide, hundreds of millions really, if we’re telling the truth, and they’re not alone.

This year there’s also Haiti and Curaçao, and I’ll even throw Norway in there. Maybe not exactly an underdog with the massive goal-scoring talent of Erling Haaland in the front line, but it’s their first time back in the World Cup in 30 years. I mean, this tournament has been full of underdogs worth rooting for.

So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about our fascination with the underdog and what compels us as human beings to so passionately support people and teams that have all the odds stacked against them. Well, Nadav Goldschmied joins us today to talk about this. He’s Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of San Diego and author of a study that’s titled “The Underdog Effect: Definition, Limitations, and Motivations.”

Why do we support those at a competitive disadvantage? Professor Goldschmied, welcome to On Point.

NADAV GOLDSCHMIED: Hello, Meghna. Happy to be here.

CHAKBRABARTI: It’s a great underdog story. Have you been watching the World Cup per chance?

GOLDSCHMIED: I have. I have. Oh. And I, I’m watching it with my son, Lev, who I observed him while Cape Verde were playing against Argentina, and the level of enthusiasm in support of Cape Verde was amazing. That’s a country that I don’t know if he can place his hand on the map and show where it is. And I’m not maligning. Probably I am, I will have the same difficulty, but, yeah, it was infectious.

CHAKRABARTI: Absolutely. Okay. So tell me a little bit, first of all, how your interest in understanding the psychology around, um, our support for underdogs, where did that emerge from?

GOLDSCHMIED: So it’s so it’s pretty counterintuitive, right? I mean, we love winning. Um, and underdogs are not supposed to win. The world is not a chaotic place. Underdogs usually fail, but somehow, or I mean, when we started, we wanted to first see if there is empirical support for what we seemingly felt in our gut. And we did find support for the underdog in sports and geopolitics. And then the second phase was to try to figure out why is this the case since it seems counterintuitive.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So the second phase then involved some kind of, you know, a testing? Tell me what you did for that second phase.

GOLDSCHMIED: Correct. So we went into the research lab, and we proposed several mechanisms. One of them is of fairness, that while we may not know much about the underdog, we assume that there is a disadvantage that is not predicated on something of their doing, that the world is, an unfair place, and the underdog kind of need our help.

And we can provide the help symbolically by supporting them. So what we did is we manipulated percentage likelihood of winning versus money available to purchase players, budget. And you see some of the-

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, wait, wait. Let me go back for a second professor, if I may. So, so tell me a little bit more about the setup of, of this experiment.

Were you using, were people coming into the lab?

GOLDSCHMIED: So two teams the participants are unfamiliar with, and we only provide them with either likelihood of winning, one team 70%, the other one 30%, or one team with large budget or small budget. So it’s between study design, so either you learn about percentages, or you learn about the money available. A third condition is when the two align. And the fourth one, the most telling, is when they negate each other.

And you see that in all of the lesser conditions, the third conditions, they go with the lesser, with the underdog.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, really?

GOLDSCHMIED: The fourth one is the one most telling because now they have to choose, and now they go with the team that has a smaller budget rather than likelihood of winning.

So we think it’s about fairness. So when you see an underdog you’re not necessarily told their means and so forth, but we assume that if they have less likelihood of winning, they’re also somehow underprivileged. So that could be one mechanism. We also see greater effort in the underdog, and we love effort.

In the competition between effort and talent, effort always wins in our hearts. So, we showed American participants a European basketball game. So they had no idea about the teams. And we manipulated the background of each team, how much were they successful against the other, and it was a counterbalance design, so half of them see team A as the underdog, and the other half sees team B as the underdog.

And then we asked them,  “How much hustle do you see in the teams, and how much talent do you see?” And you see that whenever a team is  determined to be an underdog, either A or B, they see greater effort in the team. So I think that’s baked into the underdog concept, and that’s probably why we also like the underdogs.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here for a second, Professor. So they see greater effort? Is that, that’s a perception?

GOLDSCHMIED: Yes, yes, I think yes …

CHAKRABARTI: Whether or not it was the actual truth of the amount of effort?

GOLDSCHMIED: Correct. Correct. So I think that’s one of the reasons why politicians do not shy away from the definition of underdog.

Usually they loathe to admit any weakness, but the underdog concept, they happily self-label. And I think-

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that’s good

GOLDSCHMIED: One of the reasons is basically saying to the voters, “Oh, I’m going to work hard on your behalf.”

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Soccer’s not the only place where this happens. There’s also, well, just about any sport. But how about 1983 in basketball when the North Carolina State Wolfpack made one of the most notable Cinderella runs at the NCAA championships? The team and its wins were characterized by nail-biting victories throughout their run, which culminated in a, yeah, a buzzer-beating 30-foot shot caught midair for a dunk.

ANNOUNCER [TAPE]: Down to 14 seconds. Oh, almost stolen by Drexler. Boy, is he good at that. They’ve got to drive to the basket. It’s down to seven seconds. You can see the time. Wittenberg. Oh, it’s a long ways.

CHAKRABARTI: So that’s from 1983 in basketball. Professor, you were saying earlier about how politicians oftentimes kind of understand that we may, we may, we perceive greater effort, whether it’s true or not, in underdogs, and so they want to characterize themselves as such.  I’m just wondering if there’s any other places sort of in, in life and society where you note the same desire to be an underdog or perceived as one.  Because to me,  I actually thought of it quite in the opposite way, in that everyone loves an underdog, but no one necessarily wants to be one.

GOLDSCHIED:  I agree. I think it’s the perception, right? It is where you are striving to be an underdog. It’s not that you really want be the one with the lesser chances of winning. So I think there is much flexibility in the labeling. You can, I badger a lot of people, and I ask them whether they are underdogs and they readily accept the definition. And then when I ask them why, they give me all kinds of reasons that, I don’t know if I’m buying it. It seems that there is, that we seek the perception.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Well, so what kind of things then can change a person’s support for the underdog? Is there any way to sort of shake loose that emotional connection that people have?

GOLDSCHMIED: I’ll start with saying that it seems that underdog support is both cross-cultural, based on our research, and it’s also historical. It’s not necessarily a modern phenomenon. So there are historical writings by Plebius, a Greek historian, who is describing the ancient Olympics. And he is reporting that there is underdog support. And there is a very interesting story there where a favorite athlete is actually is encountering underdog support in the stadium, and he’s trying to convince the spectators that actually they shouldn’t support his opponent because he’s member of the in-group.

And so, there are certainly ways that you try to harness the support. And in opposition you can try to erode, and say, “Oh, this is not a real underdog.”

CHAKRABARTI: Hmm, interesting. Okay, but so the fact though that just the, let’s say, the probabilistic fact, is that underdogs, very rarely do they actually, win it all.

It happens, and those are the moments that really become iconic and sort of culturally immortal. But most of the times underdogs don’t win. I’m just wondering if there’s something about the fact that we tend to not remember hen they lose versus when they win.

GOLDSCHMIED:  So memory is playing tricks on us, or maybe it’s motivated. So we conducted a study,  I think this is a good, we conducted a study about the first Rocky movie. Meghna, do you remember who is winning in the end? There were quite a few sequels.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh my God, it’s been so long since I’ve seen the movie.

GOLDSCHMIED:  I’m putting you on the spot. Yeah, it’s okay.

CHAKRABARTI: I will admit. I do not remember.

GOLDSCHMIED: It’s alright. Okay. So Rocky I is actually an anti-underdog movie because in the end he actually loses. In the sequels, he of course goes back to the pattern, to the underdog pattern. But when we ask participants about what do they recall, they have a very hard time recalling Rocky losing and it just doesn’t fit the mold, the underdog mold. So I think when people, politicians, athletes label themselves underdogs, they’re basically saying, “We are now down, but eventually we will prevail.”

So, this is another aspect of the underdog. And when we ask them to free recall underdogs of past, they mostly recall those that prevailed. So there is a skewness here. Those who lost fall to the wayside. Those who win are immortalized.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay. So maybe in the case of Cape Verde in this World Cup, we have a little bit of both, right? Because, I mean, by now everyone knows that Cape Verde actually didn’t make it that far in the knockout stage of the World Cup. But I do wanna tell that story, because at the top of the show we sort of left Cape Verde right before they began their first game in the knockout stage.

And of course, in that game they were taking on Argentina, current World Cup champions. And the game was on July 3rd in Miami, Florida. And Jill Tucker, she’s a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, but before she became a reporter for the Chronicle, she actually taught English in Praia, Cape Verde from 1990 to 1992.

So when Cape Verde made its World Cup debut, she was thrilled and wanted to watch the game with other fans. Jill found a watch party in Oakland for Cape Verde’s game against Uruguay, and when she arrived she had a bit of a shock.

JILL TUCKER [TAPE]: I just walked up to the organizer when I went to go grab a beer, and I said, “Hey, are you from Cape Verde?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m from Praia.” And I said, “Oh, I lived in Praia. I was there two years. I was a teacher.” And he got very still and very intense, and it was this weird moment of why, what is happening? And then he just looked at me and said, “You were my teacher.” And I just… It was that, you know, I like to tell people I kind of think I blacked out for a moment because how crazy is that?

CHAKRABARTI: And that’s how Jill reconnected with Ivan, a former student from, yes, many decades earlier. Now, you’ll recall that Cape Verde tied Uruguay in that group stage game, so let’s fast-forward to their fateful face-off against Argentina on July 3rd. Argentina scores in the first half, Lionel Messi, of course, in the 29th minute.

But then here comes Cape Verde in the 59th minute.

ANNOUNCER [TAPE]: Nutmegs then makes the pass in a tight angle. It’s a goal. It’s a goal. Cape Verde have scored!  Deroy Duarte (APPLAUSE) Sends shockwaves across the globe. Cape Verde have tied the game against Argentina. (CHEERS)

TUCKER [TAPE]: I think everybody loves to see that, right? They love to see players who give everything they have on that field for themselves, for their team, for their country, for their love of soccer. It’s just, yeah, magnificent. And it’s, it’s, it’s emotional. It is. I think we all feel that. Like, well, if they can do that, what does that mean for everybody else?

CHAKRABARTI: What does that mean for everybody else? Such an interesting story when thinking about underdogs. And listen, at the end of regulation time in this game, Cape Verde had held Argentina to a 1-1 tie. Absolutely incredible. I’m still kind of breathless thinking about it. So the game heads into extra time, and I need to say this again because Cape Verde, a team that had never, never, never, never been in a World Cup, had forced Messi and mighty Argentina into extra time, which meant another 30 minutes of play after having already brawled for over 90 minutes.

ANNOUNCER [TAPE]: (CHEERS) Now Alexis MacAllister’s gone down. Yeah, there’s bodies everywhere. A lot of the Argentine players appear to be cramping, where they, they go down, they’re getting stretched off. Calves are tightening up. As we’ve said, it was, it was hot and muggy. Not as hot as it has been.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Jill for one is skeptical that it was the heat.

TUCKER [TAPE]: To push Argentina to the brink of exhaustion into overtime with minutes left before they scored, and if you looked at Messi’s face, if you looked at all of these high, high-profile multimillionaire players were just dragging, and that’s what Cape Verde did to Argentina, one of the best teams in the world.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Argentina’s Lisandro Martinez scores in the 103rd minute in extra time, but then Cape Verde strikes again.

ANNOUNCER [TAPE]: Here comes Semedo trying to reset quickly and trying to catch Argentina napping. MacAllister can’t make the play. Lopes Cabral!

TUCKER [TAPE]: The second goal for Cape Verde was one of the most beautiful goals I’ve ever seen in my life, and I think the Argentinians were just like, “What was that? Who was that guy?” ‘Cause he just booted it over everybody, curled it into the back corner of the net, and it was, it was beautiful. And I mean, Messi doesn’t even kick goals that look like that.

CHAKRABARTI: But then, as underdog stories often do, this one ends in heartbreak because Cape Verde’s Diney Borges commits an own goal, giving Argentina the lead, and then the game comes to an end.

ANNOUNCER [TAPE]: For the final play of the game in Miami, it’s quickly back into play. Willy Semedo now. Livramento on the outside. Livramento trying to find space for a cross. It’s popped straight in the air. It’s another throw. No, it’s not. It’s over. One of the most remarkable games in the history of the World Cup. (CHEERS)

CHAKRABARTI: Argentina survives. Survives. Now, that is not a word I ever expected to hear about one of the best teams in the world. Survives. Now, Cape Verde might have lost 3-2 by giving Argentina the scare of its life, but for everyone in Oakland and around the world, they knew just what kind of game they had just witnessed.

TUCKER [TAPE]: It shows there’s magic in the world. There’s hope for even those of us who are not expected to achieve. It’s the old David and Goliath story, I guess, a little bit, that the little guy can somehow overcome the giant and persevere and win. Those are great stories, right? Like, they’re inspirational, and, and I can tell you that every single kid in Cape Verde are now dreaming of greatness and a world where they can win the World Cup, and that to me, that is magic. And indeed, the team was welcomed home to Cape Verde as triumphant heroes.

CHAKRABARTI: So that was Jill Tucker, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Well, I wanna bring another voice into the conversation now. It’s Edward Hirt. He’s a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, and director of the Social Psychological Study of Motivation and Performance laboratory there.

It’s called the Hirt Lab. Professor Hirt, welcome to On Point.

EDWARD HIRT: Hello. Thank you, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: Have you been watching the World Cup?

HIRT: Yes, but not as intensely, I think, as Dr. Goldschmied with his son. I don’t have any kids right now that are invested in soccer like that. But it’s been, as you said, it’s just, it’s such an exhilarating experience and an engaging thing to have teams emerge like Cape Verde that capture our hearts and attention.

CHAKRABARTI: I can tell you for a fact that in my household there’s been a lot of screaming and, like, hands put up to our faces going, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this.” Saturday was a really huge day for us here. You heard Professor Goldschmied earlier talking about the sort of the ways in which our support and the reason why support has been manifested basically throughout human history for underdogs.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me specifically how that sort of plays out or what the psychology is behind underdog support in sports fandom?

HIRT: Yeah. So I got into sports fandom because I was trying to understand myself, and I think a lot of us that are sports fans, and the complexities that happen and why we stick with teams when they don’t do well.

So for example, when I began my study of psychology, the prevailing view of fanship was that we want to follow winners because if we ally ourselves with winners, we are winners too. We boost our own self-esteem by linking us, ourselves to other people and other groups that are successful. And so the, if we didn’t accomplish something, we’re at least connected to winners, and so we’re a winner.

But there’s way more to it. And so it didn’t explain how people stick with their fandom and express loyalty to teams that don’t win. And certainly this underdog effect that Dr. Goldschmied has, has been, has been studying doesn’t fit that narrative. But what I think you guys have in this discussion really talked about is how powerful this, this story of an underdog is, and how many different kind of connections there are that seem to dovetail to make us embrace underdogs in many, many different facets of life.

So we’ve talked a little bit about politics. We’ve talked a little bit about sports. And I think there’s many aspects of just the narrative. Somebody brought up Rocky and why do we like underdog stories in movies? And I think that there is something very compelling about that, and I think we’ve touched on some really interesting aspects of that, that I’d love to go in with you, and talk about.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, definitely. I mean, b- because I mean, part of it is that it’s a narrative perspective, as Professor Goldschmied was talking about, I mean, it’s just a more compelling story, right? ‘Cause if the winners always win, you get kind of bored.

But on the other hand, and particularly with sports fandom, um, sometimes the narrative becomes your identity is that your team always loses, right? It’s not just…It’s just, like, perpetual loss, and that becomes this sort of communal experience of, like, “We love you guys in spite of the fact…”

I mean, look, I have been living in Boston for 25 years now. And I have, you know, come around to understanding why, even though the Red Sox are good, there was decades long where they never had another shot at the World Series, and that is what became the glue that held Red Sox fans together.

HIRT: Exactly. And so I came at this very much I’m in the Midwest at Indiana University, and so the narrative here was Cub fans. So like the Red Sox and the curse of the Bambino, there were Cub fans. And people always brought up the whole counter example of how can somebody be a Cubs fan when they’re the lovable losers who break your heart every August?

And so I think you’re absolutely right that one of the biggest draws to those kinds of fanship is the loyalty factor. And when the Cubs won the championship, one of the things that was I found the most fascinating was that people who were loyal Cubs fans did not like people jumping on the bandwagon because they had not suffered with their team through all those hard times and that collective suffering.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Professor, hang on here for a second because that’s f- really interesting.

PART III

CHAKRABARTI: I was wondering Professor Goldschmied, what you thought about this idea of underdog support as kind of a social glue that pulls communities together.

GOLDSCHMIED: Yeah, I think it certainly is there. I think there are three ways in which we actually become supporters. If it’s your in group through socialization. If you see a, a really good team playing well superbly, it captures your imagination. But it has to be really, really good.

And the third one is actually the underdog story. So certainly it brings people together. But if I may offer a kind of an opposite view because we are all about the exhilarating story of the underdog. It warms our heart, but there’s also others who propose otherwise. So the philosopher, Theodor Adorno is saying that the rise, the love of the underdog is basically system justification. Basically, we think of, of the underdog as an outlier. But, he’s saying, he’s arguing that a system that allows for an underdog to rise is a great system, and a system we should believe in.

So this is kind of presenting an opposite view of rather than defining the odds, let’s keep the system going.

CHAKRABARTI: So, that actually it’s interesting because you heard Jill Tucker earlier say, “Well, every kid in Cape Verde now feels that maybe he or she could go to the World Cup.” So they may feel that way, but the system though is still very much,  heavily weighted towards the nations that can afford to have training camps for kids from the, the time they’re the age of five, or the nations that can afford to pay the Lionel Messis of the world hundreds of millions of dollars.

That system isn’t changing. That is so fascinating to me, professor. And then we’re not just talking about in sports. I mean, this is an analysis that can apply to, to anything. And, Professor Heerdt, let me turn to you on that, because I wonder if that in the American context is especially relevant, right? Because the whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps, everybody loves a self-made man, et cetera. Baked into that is the kind of idea  that underdogs can win, let’s say, economically, even here in the United States. And if that’s the case, then why change the system to make it easier for more people to win economically?

HIRT: Interesting, yes. I have definitely drawn the analogy there to those kinds of narratives, the Horatio Alger story, you know? You’re picking yourself up by the bootstraps, and the American dream, and all those different narratives that we do embrace as, as being kind of exemplified by underdog stories, and seeing these people rise and be able to do it.

I guess that you’re right. You could make the argument that it also suggests that the system allows for this. But I also feel like many fans, at least the fans that I communicate with, are very dissatisfied with the current system. So I have a daughter who coaches collegiate basketball, and so many people here, and Indiana’s a big university that has a huge basketball tradition Hoosiers and things like that, that people know about.

And so the thing that’s interesting about it is that people lament that sports has become so much driven by money. So for example, in Division I collegiate basketball, we have NAL money, and the, the belief that there used to be a pure thing of people playing for the love of the game, and being loyal to their teams, and staying for four years, and playing, and that has been lost.

And I think a lot of people lament those changes where it seems more like a business, and athletes being more interested in their own image and, you know, their social media accounts, et cetera, and not playing for the love of the game. And so if it is true, like as Professor Goldschmied talked about, that we infer more effort and more persistence and kind of overcoming the talent disadvantage with greater effort and hard work and teamwork and stuff that we see in an underdog story, it really reinforces some of the things that we love about sports and competition.

And so seeing that play out, I think there are victories even if you don’t win. And so one of the things I thought that Jill’s comments were, were just this is one of the best games we’ve ever seen. Yes, they lost, but they took this monolithic team of Argentina and Messi to the brink.

They had them exhausted. They had them looking like they were questioning themselves. And so just doing that is a victory in and of itself even if you don’t win, and puts you on the map. And defying expectations is something that’s, that has this rewarding component to it that I think for many people is exhilarating and something we love about sports, and I think in other aspects of life as well, people overcoming adversities,  illness and the deck being stacked against them and other kinds of corruption or other kinds of things that we feel like defy people their opportunities.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Goldschmied, do you want to comment on that?

GOLDSCHMIED: I just would like to say that  in the semifinals, we have the four highest-ranked teams in the world competing. So I don’t know about the chances of the underdog. It’s good for a while, while it lasts.

CHAKRABARTI: But that’s exactly the point, though. That is such an important point because even though, other than the United States, I was very picky about supporting. I wanted to support underdogs in every game, right? But whenever the U.S. was playing, I was like, “I just want the U.S. to win.” Heartbroken there, but to your point, the narrative, even though it’s much more exciting when underdogs win, oftentimes it ends up with the predictable outcome, Actually, if you, if you don’t mind, gentlemen, can I just sort of drag in some armchair evolutionary psychology into this? Because, to me, it seems like people love to support underdogs, but no one ever wants to be an underdog, right? We don’t necessarily want to live lives when we’re constantly fighting giant systems or forces or teams that are destined to beat us. And so, um, Professor Goldschmied, I wonder if, is there any sort of evolutionary advantage to supporting underdogs? Because I think it would’ve been, intuitively I would’ve thought that it’d be the opposite, that you would not only want to be, but also throw your support behind perceived winners.

GOLDSCHMIED: So I think if we take the evolutionary perspective I would say that paying attention to underdogs is really crucial. If hierarchy in a small group may be determined by fighting prowess, it’s really, really important that we are sensitive to the rise of those who previously were not supposed to win, because it may mark some significant changes coming  to ourselves in the future.

So that might be where I can connect it to evolutionary psychology. So maybe that’s where it’s coming.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Professor Hirt,  did you have a thought about that?

HIRT: Yeah, I think there’s, there’s countervailing forces there, and I think you’re right about the idea of being vigilant to the fact that others are trying to come up. And so I think of it a lot in terms of expectations. And so being a favorite leads to expectations of success, which are good in terms of believing in yourself, but also put a mark on you where everybody wants to knock you off and, and there’s pressure. And we think of teams being sometimes complacent, thinking that they have all the talent or thinking that they have all the resources and that they can get their comeuppance from somebody who on a given day gets them at a moment when they’re not quite prepared for a tough tussle or a very difficult kind of game.

The other thing that Professor Goldschmeid brought up was, was the interesting thing about using characterization of yourself as an underdog as a tool. That’s a very powerful one. Because I think the idea that you feel disrespected, you feel like people don’t expect from you. I know that coaches certainly utilize that to a great extent and to get their team to feel like they have to go and prove something. And again, will you give the effort? Will you persist? Will you be able to do that if you feel like whether it’s the system or, or just the fan base or whatever kind of thing is against you in that situation?

I think it can be a great motivational tool to perceive yourself as the underdog. The question is, is there a balance there that you know you’re good, but you’re allowing this to be just a motivational tool, or do you actually question your talent level and, and the degree to which you belong there?

I think there’s a, there’s a balance to be struck there but there’s countervailing forces where you’ve got to use it strategically, I think, to get the best benefit of that moniker.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I wanna take one quick moment just to relive another… This is a truly historic and historically famous underdog moment.

It’s from 1980 The Olympic Games, Winter Olympics. You know where I’m going with this. This is the U.S. Men’s Olympic Ice Hockey Team, where they beat the Soviet Union 4-3, won the gold medal.

Um, do you believe in miracles, right? But before the game began, here was the mood amongst the announcers.

ANNOUNER [TAPE]: For the US team, it’s really discovery time. It’s one thing to be young and promising, and it’s quite another to be good. And in the next two and a half hours, the U.S. team players will go through perhaps the most difficult and demanding, yet exhilarating time of their lives. They will be playing against a very good team, a team that’s better than they are, and after that time, after it’s all over, this team will find out an awful lot about themselves. They’ll simply find out how good they are.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that was before the game, and of course, as I said, they went on to win. I mean, people know that, right? It is literally one of the most historic moments in modern sports. And after that game, in a way, the announcer sounded a lot like what you heard from the Cape Verde-Argentina game.

They reiterate, even though Cape Verde had lost, the announcers reiterated the unlikelihood of success.

ANNOUNCER [TAPE]: So the United States has done it, defeating the Soviet Union in the most improbable circumstance you could ever have imagined before these Olympics started. The final score, the USA, four, the Soviet Union, three.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to get to this idea now, gentlemen,  I think it was mentioned before, but I want to probe it a little bit more, about loyalty. And Professor Hirt, I mean, how much does just sort of persistent loyalty factor into our support of underdogs? And you had begun to say that loyalty can oftentimes become tribal because when people jump on the bandwagon when an underdog finally wins, long-term supporters can oftentimes be pretty annoyed by that, to put it mildly.

HIRT: Yeah, I think when you’re the underdog, and we talk about underdog stories like the U.S. team, or you alluded to that amazing basketball run that NC State had in 1983. And if you are a fan of that team, and you are the underdog in every game, and you’re able to just keep this run going and stuff. The amount of camaraderie and loyalty to that team has just got to be magnified with each successive success there.

And again, people are still disrespecting you with every next game, right? Thinking that you don’t stand a chance against the Soviets or against, wasn’t that the Houston team with Phi Slama Jama with all these NBA first round picks and stuff? It was an interesting kind of thing.

The other aspect of underdog stories we’re talking about is just the idea that we embrace them in the moment. None of us at U.S. knew anything about Cape Verde, but knowing that this team had qualified and gotten into that situation, there really isn’t the loyalty factor there. It’s just the embracing in the moment, them being in the field and making the most of this amazing opportunity that they have to put themselves on the map, to show the world that they belong. And I think that aspect of things is an amazing part of this whole narrative and story.

CHAKRABARTI: I, full disclosure, I am one of those Americans who had literally never known the name of a single Cape Verdean soccer player until the beginning of this, this tournament. Professor Goldschmied, in the last minute or so that we have, I want to turn back to your gentle warnings about underdog support, because I think it’s actually very, very crucial to understand.

I mean, are you saying that we’re at risk of being manipulated in some way because of this natural human tendency to wanna support people who are the least likely, uh, to win?

GOLDSCHMIED: We could be manipulated. I also think that we could be manipulative. So before, I presented this theory of fairness, that we are motivated by fairness, but one can also say we are  doing it for self-presentation.

So if the underdog is not likely to win, if we support it in the unlikely event that it wins, we have huge positive payoff, emotional payoff. If it loses, then the expectations were set aside. If we go with the favorite, based on the same logic, we can only suffer. It is also very possible that there’s a lot of manipulation going on here, with the underdog and the perception of the underdog.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.