The Ever-Evolving Dark Side Emotions of the Football Supporters: a Study on Adaptation of Schadenfreude Scale

Abstract

Enjoying from others’ maleficence, defined as schadenfreude, is a common emotion among football team supporters. Based on the social identity of supporters, schadenfreude develops as part of the rivalry, which the main sources of it are ‘similarity’, ‘repeated competition’, and ‘competitiveness’. This study is aimed to understand and classify supporters’ schadenfreude reasons based on an adapted scale. For this aim, the data gathered from a questionnaire consisting of a sample of 1.163 supporters of 14 Turkish football teams is examined by SPSS in order to reveal participants’ schadenfreude and their reasons for evaluating their rivals. As a result of participants’ rivalry classifications, the most common reasons for considering a team as a rival are determined respectively as ‘image’, ‘neighborhood’, and ‘worldview difference’. Moreover, schadenfreude is mostly felt towards the archrival, and supporters would be happiest with negativities experienced by the rival team’s managers. However, damage to rival team facilities is found as an unhappy situation. The study is the first that demonstrates the relationship between schadenfreude and rivalry and proposes ‘unique incident’ and ‘feasible contingencies’ as new rivalry factors. With these factors, different perspectives on the formation and continuity of rivalry are presented. © 2025 The Author(s)