Watch the crowd during a VAR check.
The goal has gone in. The celebration has already happened. Then the referee puts a hand to his ear, and the cameras pan across the stand, and what you see is extraordinary. People praying. People kissing the badge on their shirt. People holding on to complete strangers. Grown adults performing small private rituals at a screen in a stadium, several hundred miles from the monitor that is actually deciding the outcome.
Nothing any of them do will change the decision. Every one of them knows that.
They do it anyway. And if you understand why, you understand something useful about how your own people behave when the stakes are high and the outcome is out of their hands.
Why are football fans so superstitious?
Superstition is driven by two things: uncertainty and importance. When an outcome matters enormously and you cannot control any part of it, human beings manufacture a control mechanism. The lucky shirt, the same seat, the same drink at the same point in the first half. It gives us a perceived element of control where we have none.
That was my answer when Sky Sports News asked me about it during the World Cup, and it is not a folk theory. Schippers and Van Lange studied top-level athletes and found that commitment to rituals rose in step with two variables: how much the event mattered, and how uncertain the outcome felt. Ellen Langer had named the underlying mechanism decades earlier as the illusion of control, our tendency to behave as though we can influence things that are genuinely outside our hands.
Where does the behaviour come from in the first place? In 1948, B.F. Skinner delivered food to hungry pigeons at fixed intervals, entirely regardless of what the birds were doing. Within a short time they were turning circles, bobbing their heads and swinging towards one corner of the cage. They had connected an accidental behaviour to a reward that was arriving anyway.
We do exactly the same. Something good happens, and the brain grabs the most vivid thing that preceded it. One coincidence starts a ritual. A second one makes it permanent.
Why does VAR trigger so much superstitious behaviour?
Because a VAR check is the formula in its purest form: maximum consequence, zero control, and a wait. Uncertainty and importance arrive together and there is nothing to do with the interval except fill it.
That is why the praying and the badge-kissing appear on camera during the check rather than during open play. In open play there is something to shout at. During the check there is only the waiting, and waiting with no available action is the condition under which ritual reliably appears, in a stadium or anywhere else.
What is the difference between a routine and a superstition?
The behaviour can be identical. What separates them is where the control sits, and you only discover that when the thing is taken away. A routine keeps control inside you: if it is missing, you are mildly irritated and then you perform. A superstition hands control to something outside you: if it is missing, you have already decided how the day is going.
The best statement of this I have heard came from the former professional footballer sitting alongside me in that interview. Asked whether he had been superstitious, he said he liked to listen to the same song before going out, and kept to the same pre-match sequence. But he would not call it a ritual, he said: if it was there he wanted it, and if it was not there, it would not affect him.
That is the whole distinction, delivered by someone who lived it.
A routine is a trigger. It puts your attention in a familiar place and settles your arousal, and it does that job whether or not the playlist works. A superstition has outsourced the job to an object, so the absence of the object removes the thing you believe makes you good.
I once watched a world heavyweight champion move through the same long sequence in the dressing room before a fight, every element in the same order, every time. Not one part of it had anything to do with punching. It was all attention and arousal, and he could have done every step of it in any dressing room in the world. That is what a routine looks like when it is built properly: portable, owned, and doing an identifiable job.
He then told a story that sits on the line between the two. If he scored in a pair of boots, he kept wearing them. When a boot ripped, the thought arrived: will the goals dry up now? By kick-off, he said, he had forgotten about it.
Most of us live exactly there, and that is fine. The behaviour only becomes expensive when it stops being decoration and starts being load-bearing.
Do lucky charms actually work?
No. There is no reliable evidence that a lucky object improves performance. The most famous study suggesting otherwise has failed high-powered replication twice, and the effect is now best estimated as close to zero.
In 2010, a study in Psychological Science reported that people told they were putting with a lucky golf ball holed 6.4 of 10 putts, against 4.8 for those who were not. It went round the world and it is still quoted at conferences today. Then it was tested properly. Calin-Jageman and Caldwell ran two pre-registered replications in 2014, with the original author’s assistance, and found effects close to zero. In 2020, Dickhäuser and colleagues pre-registered replications of a different experiment from the same paper, with the same result.
I would rather give you the unhelpful truth than the entertaining version, because the unhelpful truth leads somewhere far more useful. Rituals are still everywhere in sport, and they are telling you something accurate. Not about luck. About where people feel exposed.
What does the psychology of penalty shootouts tell us?
That the most pressurised moment in sport responds to preparation rather than luck. England lost six of their seven major tournament shootouts before 2018. What changed was not fortune but process: kick order, rehearsed routines, and the walk from the halfway line practised rather than avoided.
Gareth Southgate, who had missed the decisive kick himself at Euro 96, treated the record as a skill problem rather than a curse. Geir Jordet, whose research on shootouts is the most extensive there is, has found that the behaviours predicting a miss are avoidance behaviours: turning away from the goalkeeper after placing the ball, and rushing the kick immediately after the whistle. Both are attempts to get an unbearable moment over with, and both were addressed.
England then beat Colombia on penalties in 2018, won again against Switzerland in the Nations League, lost the Euro 2020 final to Italy, and won against Switzerland at Euro 2024. That is not a cure. It is a shift in the odds, achieved entirely through process, in the most psychologically hostile situation in world sport.
Nobody achieved it with a lucky charm.
The advice I would give any penalty taker is the advice I gave on air: build the routine and do not budge from it. Same sequence, same thought process, decision made and not revisited. Consider the alternative on that walk from the halfway line, with the away end whistling and a goalkeeper six foot seven with his arms in the air. Left or right. Hard or placed. Maybe chip it. Your mind is now everywhere, at the exact moment it needs to be in one place.
A routine is not comfort. It is the thing that occupies the gap so that panic cannot.
Where does this show up in a business?
Wherever you have high importance, low control and a wait. The tender submitted with a decision due Thursday. The due diligence period. Results day. The restructure announced but not yet detailed. The fortnight after the final interview.
Those are your VAR checks, and they produce exactly the same behaviour: ritual, rumour, blame and magical thinking. Most leaders either mock it or ignore it, and both are mistakes, because the behaviour is a signal. It is telling you precisely where your people feel exposed, and where their attention is going instead of onto their work.
It also explains a pattern I see constantly in organisations under strain. Habits that no longer serve any purpose become untouchable. The meeting format nobody will change. The report nobody reads. The phrase “we have always done it this way”, which is almost never about evidence and almost always about anxiety.
When I wrote the FA Guide to Psychology in Football, the model gave psychology one of four pillars, alongside the technical, the tactical and the physical. I would write it differently now. The psychological is not a fourth pillar standing beside the others. It is the ground the other three are standing on, and moments like these are where that becomes visible: the skill is intact, the preparation is intact, and performance still falls apart, because nobody addressed the layer underneath.
How do you build routines that survive disruption?
You cannot legislate superstition out of a team, and you should not try. What you can do is build routines strong enough that the superstitions stay decorative. Three questions do most of the work.
Would it survive disruption? A change of venue, a change of personnel, a two-hour delay. If not, it is a superstition wearing a lanyard.
Where does the control sit? Inside the person, or in an object, a place or a sequence they do not own? That is the whole difference.
Does it do a job? A routine directs attention and regulates arousal. If you cannot say what it is actually for, it is reassurance, and reassurance stops working the moment it becomes unavailable.
The same principle, at the scale of a season
When I joined Alan Curbishley at West Ham, the club was bottom of the Premier League, ten points from safety with ten games to play.
That is a VAR check lasting nine weeks. The outcome mattered enormously, nobody in the building could control it, and there was nothing to do but wait and play. Which is precisely the condition in which people start reaching for anything that feels like influence.
So we replaced the uncontrollable with the controllable. We broke the run-in into three blocks of three games, with a floor of five points per block. Nobody was asked to keep the club up. Everybody was asked for five points from the next three.
The team took 21 points from 27, a 78 per cent return, having been running at 23 per cent when I arrived.
That is a routine built at the scale of a season. It gave a frightened group something they owned, in a situation where almost nothing else was theirs.
So keep the lucky pants
Genuinely. One of the odder rituals that came up in that interview was a supporter who eats his dinner in a fixed order and breaks that order on occasion, in the belief that it will help Harry Kane score. It is harmless, it is funny, and it is a very human response to caring deeply about something you cannot influence.
The only question that matters is what happens on the day they are in the wash.
If the answer is that you are mildly annoyed and then you get on with it, you have a routine, and you are fine.
If the answer is that you have already decided how the day is going to go, then the lucky pants are not decorating your performance.
They are holding it up.
Roberto Forzoni is a performance psychologist with four decades in elite sport. He is the author of the FA Guide to Psychology in Football, was National Performance Psychologist at the LTA, and has worked with eight Premier League clubs, world champions, Grand Slam players and Olympic athletes.
Speaking: Roberto delivers keynotes on performance under pressure, winning teams and the winning mindset to conferences and leadership teams. Check availability.
Working with teams and individuals: He works with organisations and individual performers on culture, pressure and sustained high performance. Get in touch.
Media: Available for comment on the psychology of pressure, superstition, penalties, choking, resilience and team culture. Regular contributor to BBC, Sky Sports and Al Jazeera. London based, in studio, down the line or remote. Same-day response. Media enquiries.