Half of all football fans have a match-day ritual. The higher up the game you go, the worse it gets. Here is why even your most rational people do it, and what it reveals about leading a team under pressure.
If your team lost at the weekend, I have some uncomfortable news about whose fault it was. According to the data, there is a fair chance it was yours.
A 2025 global survey found that half of all football fans follow a specific match-day ritual, and of those who do, 91% genuinely believe the result depends on them carrying it out. So if you forgot to sit in your usual seat, or you finally washed the lucky shirt, the defeat is, statistically speaking, on you. Apologies.
I find this endlessly interesting, and not only because I have spent four decades working in elite sport. I am also a member of the Inner Magic Circle, which means part of my living comes from convincing intelligent people that something impossible just happened. Superstition is the brain running that same trick on itself, for free, every match day. The useful question for anyone who leads people is not whether it is daft. It is why the most rational, highest performers on earth still do it, and what that tells us about getting the best from a team when the pressure is on.
The roll call is glorious
The closer you look, the funnier it gets.
- Michael Jordan wore his old North Carolina college shorts under his Chicago Bulls kit for his entire career. To hide them he ordered longer shorts, which is more or less why baggy shorts took over the NBA.
- Bjorn Borg refused to shave during Wimbledon, kept the beard for the fortnight, and won five years in a row.
- Gary Lineker would not take a single shot in the warm-up, in case he “wasted” a goal.
- Rafael Nadal lines his drinks bottles up with the labels facing the court, the same way, every match. He insists it is order, not luck.
- PelE, as the story is told, blamed a slump on giving his lucky shirt away, had someone track it down, recovered his form, and only later learned the shirt he was handed back was never the original.
- And almost a quarter of ordinary fans admit they will not wash during a tournament while results are going their way. Romance, clearly, is alive and well.
You can pile on LeBron James and his pre-game chalk toss, the American football coach Les Miles chewing grass off the pitch, or the baseball player who took his bats to bed so nobody could swap them in the night. Different sports, same instinct.
So why do brilliant people do it?
Here is the serious bit, and it is the part that matters at work.
Superstition is not really about luck. It is about control. Research by Schippers and Van Lange found that athletes most often reach for rituals in two specific conditions: when the outcome is uncertain and when it genuinely matters. Underneath both sits psychological tension, and the ritual is simply the mind’s way of doing something when there is nothing useful left to do. That is why the rituals appear in the cup final and the penalty shootout, not the meaningless friendly.
There is a famous study (Damisch, 2010) suggesting a lucky charm can lift performance by raising self-belief. I will be straight with you, as I am with every audience: larger, tighter studies have mostly failed to reproduce that effect, so I will not promise you a charm makes you better at golf. The mechanism that does hold up is the management of tension under uncertainty. As the sport psychologist Adam Naylor put it, these habits are mostly harmless, and only become a problem when they “control the player rather than the player controlling them”.
That single line is the whole game.
The same instinct lives in your business
Now swap the dressing room for the boardroom. Uncertainty and high stakes are not unique to sport. They are the daily weather of running a company: the launch, the funding round, the pitch, the reorganisation. Under exactly those conditions, teams reach for control in exactly the same way.
You will have met the cursed tactics board. I once watched a captain decide, in complete seriousness, that a tactics pad was unlucky, because we had used it once and lost. We used it once, we lost once, and the pad caused the defeat. It is a flawless example of the oldest trick the brain plays: inventing a cause where there was only a coincidence. Businesses do it constantly. We changed the deck template and won the client, so now the template is sacred. The quarter went well after we moved the Monday meeting, so it’s now untouchable. That is not a strategy. It is a pigeon dance in a nicer suit.
The danger is precisely the one Naylor describes. When a team’s confidence is hung on an external thing, a lucky process, one particular person, a ritual that merely happened to coincide with success, the team becomes fragile. The day that thing goes missing, you have handed yourself a ready-made reason to fall apart.
Keep the function, lose the object
Here is the reframe I leave audiences with, and it is the bit worth keeping.
There is a world of difference between a superstition and a routine. A superstition puts the power outside you, in the shirt, the seat or the spreadsheet, and it is fragile by design. A routine puts the power inside you. It is a sequence you control, built around the process rather than around magic, and it delivers everything the superstition promised, the calm, the focus, the readiness, without the dependency. The best performers I have worked with do not lean on a lucky charm to rescue them. They lean on preparation so well grooved that under pressure, they do not rise to the occasion; they sink to the level of their training.
For a leader, the task is to build the team’s confidence on things it can actually control, and to make the place psychologically safe enough that nobody is quietly clinging to lucky socks out of fear. Belief is one of the most powerful tools a human being has. The mistake is never believing. The mistake is pointing that belief at something that can be taken away. Aim it at the preparation, the process and the people, and it cannot be lost.
Where this comes from
I have spent forty years working with elite performers. As National Psychology Manager at the Lawn Tennis Association, I helped build the psychology programme behind British tennis, including the early support structure around a young Andy Murray. I wrote the Football Association’s guide to psychology in football, and worked inside Premier League clubs, including West Ham, where one turnaround carried a side from a 23% points return to 78% across nine games. Athletes I have supported have gathered more than fifteen major championship medals between them. Sir Clive Woodward has been generous enough to vouch for the work, and I have been contributing to the BBC, Sky and Al Jazeera since 2000. The magic is not a gimmick. It is a daily reminder of how readily the human mind can be convinced of things that are not true, and how much of performance is really belief wearing a tracksuit.
I bring all of it to the stage in a keynote called The Lucky Shirt, for conferences, leadership off-sites, and team away days. It is built to be genuinely funny and quietly useful in equal measure.
So by all means, keep the lucky socks. Just do not bet the company on them.
If you would like to talk about bringing The Lucky Shirt to your event, I would love to hear from you.