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Author: Graham Pike

Club v Country: The psychology of switching support

Updated Thursday, 11 June 2026

Graham Pike explores the psychology behind the 'club versus country' conundrum as a football fan. 

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Since the start of the Premier League in 1992, players have come from 128 different countries, with Mozambique, Iraq and Bangladesh being added to the list in 2026. In the 2025/26 season, 65 different nationalities were represented, including 36 players from the Netherlands, 15 of whom are in that country’s national squad for the 2026 World Cup. In other words, topflight football is a deeply globalised sport.

This can lead to a scenario that anyone who is a keen supporter of a football club will recognise. You are watching the World Cup and suddenly players that have been your opponents all season long are now playing for your country, even those from ‘that’ club (you know the one), that you have such a close rivalry with. These players are no longer rivals but are now ‘your’ players and playing for ‘your’ country. It can be quite a paradoxical feeling when you consider it, a feeling of newfound camaraderie with a longstanding enemy.

The psychology of this is, to start with at least, fairly simple. Groups and group membership tend to play an important part in establishing our identity, in making us who we are. Forming groups has been an important part of our evolution, and we have developed mechanisms that make these groups coherent. Supporting a football club makes us part of a group that includes the players and fans of the club. They become our ‘in-group’. Players and fans of other clubs become an ‘out-group’, and psychologists have found that whilst in-groups will cohere by adopting shared beliefs and behaviours, they will also feel hostility towards out-groups, particularly when groups are put in a position where they must compete against each other. 

In-group to out-group

Of course, the reality is far more complex than this, and our identities and the ways that groups work are not nearly so straightforward. However, ‘in-group/out-group’ is a powerful psychological phenomenon. Research has found that group membership can drive hostility and conflict even when there is no history of interaction between the groups and even when the groups are randomly assigned according to meaningless categories. For example, a famous series of studies conducted by Henri Tajfel and colleagues in the 1970s found that teenage boys would favour their in-group over their out-group even when the group was ‘virtual’ (the boys never met and there was no tangible link between them to create the group). At least this seems to be true of the cultures in North America and Britain. The results of this research were not found in New Zealand when the participants were Maori and Pacific Island children, though European New Zealand children did produce the same results.

As well as previously out-group players now becoming part of your own in-group, the opposite also occurs. If, for example, you support teams from the Premier League, Championship or Scottish Premiership, many of the players from your club are likely to play for a different country to your own. Might that mean you see them in a different light? A player that has been part of your in-group all season becomes part of your out-group when they play against your country’s team! 

'Real' and parasocial relationships

As well as the formations of groups and how they impact our identity, it is also possible to form relationships with the players of your team. Unless you know the player personally, these are referred to as ‘parasocial relationships’ as they are entirely one-way. Even so, parasocial relationships can effectively replace ‘real’ relationships in staving off loneliness and even providing the positive health benefits associated with relationships. 

Just like ‘real’ relationships, it seems people who form parasocial relationships can also experience ‘break ups’; and that’s not just your favourite soap opera character leaving or the end of your favourite series of novels, it also seems to apply to football fans. A study was published in 2023 (Mikkilineni et al., 2023) that explored the impact on FC Barcelona fans of the departure of Lionel Messi in 2021, which found that fans had formed a parasocial relationship with the footballing star and also experienced a parasocial breakup when he left!

Of course, when a player for your club takes the field for a country that is competing against yours it is not quite a break-up, because they will be back in your in-group for the start of the next season, but it could well feel like you are ‘on a break’!

Find out more

We are currently conducting some research looking at fans’ relationships with players during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. If you would like to find out more about this research, and even to participate (it doesn’t take long), go to World Cup Study.

You can find out more about in-groups and out-groups in this Starting with psychology course.

You can find out more about parasocial relationships in this What happens to when you read? course.

This article is based on research conducted by Graham Pike, Sarah Laurence, Maika Telga and Martin Thirkettle, and was co-edited by Alex Twitchen.

References

  • Mikkilineni, S.D., Billings, A.C., Brown, K.A. and Ramon, X., 2023. ‘The role of team and social identity in parasocial relationships and parasocial breakups: Lionel Messi’s departure from FC Barcelona’, International Journal of Communication, 17, pp. 4667–4685.

  • Premier League (2025, September 13) All the nations represented in the Premier League https://www.premierleague.com/en/news/4353667/all-the-nations-represented-in-the-premier-league

 

 

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