Crime and Football: Domestic Violence Rises 10 Percent After NFL Upsets

Researchers suggest unexpected disappointment may underlie loss of control and violent behavior. March 24, 2011 By Robert Wicks - Calls to the police reporting men's assaults on their wives or intimate partners rose 10 percent in areas where the local National Football League team lost a game they were favored to win, according to an analysis of 900 regular-season NFL games reports researchers in a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics . Football games are emotionally laden events of widespread interest, typically garnering 25 percent or more of a local television viewing audience. The disappointment of an unexpected loss, the researchers concluded, raises the risk that football fans may react inappropriately. In contrast, co-authors David Card of the University of California, Berkeley and Gordon Dahl of the University of California, San Diego found no decrease in reports of violence following an unexpected win by the local team or by the team's loss in a game that was expected to be close. "Our paper points to the important role expectations play in modulating our emotions," said Dahl, associate professor of economics at UC San Diego. "Losing only provokes violence if the loss was unexpected." "Our results suggest that the overall rise in violence between the intimate partners we studied is driven entirely by losses in games that matter most to fans," Card said.