Whenever you go to a stadium, whether that be a soccer game, American football, basketball, baseball, or any sport that has a bunch of spectators sitting next to each other, you’ll always find people cheering loudly for their team whenever something interesting happens, like a cool pass or shot, and especially when a goal lands.
Sports organizers like to measure audience engagement with this noise; hearing loud cheers means the audience is paying attention and enjoying the game, and if the audience enjoys the game, they’ll come back for more in the future.
Many stadiums, both professional and college level, have their own methods of entertaining the crowd, such as using the jumbotron to show off cool plays or goals. I went to a soccer game about a month ago, and the whole stadium flashed the lights on and off, and the jumbotron swapped between their home teams’ colors, so the whole stadium knew they scored a goal, naturally accompanied by loud cheers from most of the stadium.
People take the rules of their respective games very seriously; people have their own interpretation of what should have happened at any given moment during a game. There’s lots of money going into every game, fans betting on sides and player contracts. If something doesn’t feel right in a game, people will riot, feeling cheated out of points. That’s why referees feel so controversial.
There are moments that cause a bunch of jeering, which sports organizations can largely ignore due to how popular sports games are, but once in a blue moon the audience gets so upset with the outcome of a game that everything just falls apart. Look up “Cleveland Bottlegate” for a prime example of a game falling apart due to sheer audience anger.
Cheering has become a universal symbol to cheer for your team as loud as possible as a way to measure your support for a team regardless of how noise gets treated from culture to culture. At the World Cup they often had cheering battles between the two sides for fun. It’s something everyone can understand regardless of language.
