Recently watched the India-Sri Lanka-Bangladesh tri-series matches and noticed how fans including many of my close friends react to teams' victory and loss. This got me curious about the reasons why fans follow sports so passionately, to extents where there are chances of violence and hooliganism. The following post is a download of an article written by Shirley Wang in 2006 that compiles the research that attempt to answer this question. I have highlighted the sentences that I found important.