The Emotional Autopsy of Watching Your Team Lose
By Ben Fulton
July 17, 2026
North American sports culture has usually seemed content to have the losing side shrug it off. European football culture—erstwhile “soccer” culture, as most Americans still insist—is never quite satisfied unless the losing side grinds its collective teeth in stages of mourning.
I was never supposed to find a favorite team to root for in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Then I smirked along to the charm of European football fans marveling at the scale of Yankee abundance in grocery stores and the glory of our air-conditioned, super-sized gas stations. The befuddlement and surprise of supposed juggernaut teams from Germany and the Netherlands suffering defeat at the hands of supposed mid-tier teams from Paraguay and Morocco, respectively, cast anticipations sideways and straight into the David-Goliath paradigm. This was excitement brewing steadily into sports delirium. Sooner or later, I was going to place my heart on a team. For reasons of family ties and cultural affinities I will not bore you with, England became my team.
English football club diehards might say I was fortunate to enter this year’s FIFA fray only before The Three Lions matched against Mexico, or “El Tri,” on July 5. Wedging my way, along with my girlfriend, into St. Louis’s Amsterdam Tavern, I watched the game alongside fútboleros dressed to the nines in green capes and mascaras. The whole tavern was blessed with a match for the ages, with England’s Jude Bellingham finding the back of the net twice in two minutes, team captain Harry Kane scoring a penalty, and the entire team defending its 3-2 lead at the end of the clock, one man short of the usual 11. England’s 2-1 victory over Norway on July 11 was more tenuous, but the team still got away with it, albeit with some controversial help of a camera cable for one of Bellingham’s two goals. I belted out the strains of Oasis’s “Wonderwall”—the (un)official anthem of England’s World Cup run of luck into the quarterfinals—with another lone English fan, a middle-aged man from the Midlands who shook my hand twice. Walking out of the tavern that day, I felt the glow of crashing the world’s greatest party after having written my own invitation. The World Cup calls to everyone. All it asks in return is that you give it your heart and soul.
If you followed the FIFA World Cup, you know the rest of the story. England had it all but wrapped up against Argentina, with Morgan Rogers’s cross to Anthony Gordon giving England a 1-0 lead until the 85th minute. England put an effective limit on the shots of Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest athlete in the history of the game, but it could not limit his crosses. But with England coach Thomas Tuchel choosing substitutions for the tactic of playing a defensive rearguard to hopeful victory, none of that mattered anyway. Argentina’s Enzo Fernández equaled the score just five minutes from final match time. Soon after, Messi delivered a precision cross to Lautaro Martinez, who headed it into the net. Never mind that England’s goalkeeper, Jordan Pickford, remains arguably the best of any team in the entire FIFA 2026 roster.
In the post-game autopsy, the English football commentariat did what they do best. They lacerated themselves—but mostly Tuchel—in the adjectives, phrases, and metaphors of absolute, soul-crushing pain. Albeit with a sense of that trademark, morbid humor that is distinctively dour, sour, but also an off-kilter mix of self-effacing, yet also self-deprecating demeanor. “Gutted,” over and over, “gutted,” has been the operative word. The question of why Tuchel declined to put Bukayo Saka or other star players on the field for the premiere-style game he always promised English fans, to instead play “five at the back” for a haggard defense, was tantamount to discovering, as Sky Sports World Cup commentator Pien Meulensteen and others put it, “that daddy doesn’t love you.”
And on it went, straight into another set of endless homages about how the Argentines understood the art of getting under your opponent’s skin during the first half, only to have Messi walk into those hallowed spaces of opportunity for a precision cross to a teammate, after which the back of the net seems like destiny foretold.
“This is the first stamp of pain,” for English fans not yet old enough to remember England’s similarly agonizing loss to Argentina in 1986, opined UK radio sports commentator Max Rushden. “You can turn to your kid and say, ‘This is how it is.’”
There is no arguing against winning and success, which invariably feels great. The problem with winning is that it is nowhere near as interesting as failure. It sounds just like the loser to complain that winning is “boring,” in that it prompts no reflection or analysis. But that complaint also rings true. And no one does failure, or at least quiet, resigned decline, quite like the English. Right now the internet is teeming with English agony, English disappointment, English rage, dejection, and resigned disbelief that they must wait not just another four years for the next World Cup, but another four years on top of the 60 they have had to wait to redeem the last year their country won the World Cup in 1966.
Samuel Beckett, while Irish—Anglo-Irish, if we want to be technical about it—put it best in Worstward Ho (1983): “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Ernest Hemingway, not English at all but an American who committed suicide, nonetheless taught us that “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.” By some management accounts, the phrase of our era, especially as we enter the indeterminate claws of AI, is “Always fail in new ways.” Tuchel, if you like to blame the coach, did not do that, having played the same defensive endgame against Argentina that he played against Mexico. The charitable analysis might be that Argentina, in its match against England, found a way to win that was entirely new to Tuchel.
Reason says the fan of the losing side is best to root for the victor that goes on to play. For if the team you lost to subsequently wins it all, is that not proof that your favored team lost to the most skilled, deserving opponent? Spite declines that route, shouting “No way!” at the top of its lungs. The fan of the losing side longs to see the team that humiliated you face an equal (preferably worse) humiliation. There is reason in losing well, but only revenge in losing badly. The ideal loser, if there is such a person, yearns for an elusive proportion of reason and spite. Sadly, it is not clear if that exists at all. But the good loser—the analytic and reflective loser—tries all the same.
