Intergroup criticism promoted fan aggression in Austrian national team supporters during the European Football Championship 2024

Fan aggression in football has severe direct (unpleasant experiences, bodily injuries, even death) and indirect (reputation and sanctions) consequences for fans; it is therefore crucial to understand the underlying psychological processes precisely. We argue that the intergroup context in and around stadiums fosters aggression, since opposing fans engage in bidirectional provocation in close physical proximity. Such critical communication across group boundaries (intergroup criticism) reliably elicits costly punishment, a common measure of aggression. Accordingly, our key aim was to investigate intergroup criticism as a candidate psychological process underlying fan aggression; we additionally explored the role of team rivalry. We hypothesized that critical outgroup commenters would elicit more aggression than ingroup commenters. Our online experiment during the European Football Championship 2024 followed a 3-cell within-participants design: Austrian fans (N = 60) read three critical comments on their fan culture from an ingroup source (Austrian fan) and two outgroup sources (German fan and Swiss fan). Participants indeed evaluated outgroup commenters (motive η² = .36, anger η² = .11, and sympathy η² = .17) and messages (threat η² = .19) more negatively than an ingroup commenter voicing the same message. This effect extended to behavioral costly punishment (η² = .11), indicating that intergroup criticism elicited aggressive fan behavior. No reliable differences between rival (Germany) and non-rival (Switzerland) outgroups emerged, indicating that intergroup criticism promotes fan aggression independent of rivalry. We discuss how intergroup criticism catalyzes fan aggression and how this knowledge contributes to the cultivation of peaceful sports events.