As the new season of Ted Lasso started, I was reminded of one of the show’s stranger storylines. When Dani “Football is life!” Rojas gets injured, his teammates blame the incident on a curse said to haunt the treatment room. But sports curses aren’t just fictional plot devices.
Football is fertile ground for stories of mysterious forces, blamed for everything from missed penalties to decades of failure. Take Mayo’s Gaelic football team. After they won the All-Ireland title in 1951, the story goes that a local priest cursed them, declaring they would not win another final until every member of that team had died.
Over the next 75 years, Mayo reached 11 more finals – and lost them all. Paddy Prendergast, the last surviving member of the 1951 squad, died in 2021. Then Mayo made it to the final again last month and won.
This prompted the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, who has family ties to Mayo, to announce on X: “The curse is broken.” Birmingham City – a team close to my heart – has its own curse story. The club is said to have endured decades of disappointment after a 100-year hex was placed on its home ground in 1906. And this year, Harry Kane missed a close-range chance in England’s Fifa World Cup match against Ghana, shortly after a “witch-doctor” claimed to have cast a spell on him.
There are, of course, many possible explanations. Maybe supernatural forces really were at work. Maybe the teams had bad luck, made tactical errors or were simply beaten by better opponents.
Or maybe, once the curse became part of the team’s folklore, it acquired a life of its own. In this scenario, it doesn’t matter whether the “spells” were ever cast, or whether players personally believed in them. What matters is that the idea gained a cultural foothold.
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