Brené Brown on the Psychology of Winning, Collective Joy, and Football’s Power to Unite: Men in Blazers 07/17/26

0:00You're listening to the Men in Blazers Media Network, Suboptimal Radio.

0:05Brené Brown:The number one driver of playing to not lose is emotion and it's negative valence. A team like Argentina smells fear. They're going to capitalize.

0:22My guest today is someone I've been aching to debrief the entire World Cup with pretty well since it started because she's a remarkable human being who's built a career exploring and studying the feelings of connection, vulnerability, love and shame. A combination, as I say, those words that you know is familiar to so many football fans around the world right now. She's the author of six New York Times bestsellers, host of the quite fantastic Dare to Lead podcast. And she's a massive Liverpool fan. Someone who'll understand what we've been through in terms of memory making and collective experience to this World Cup wonder.

1:00It's a joy to welcome back.

1:01Brené Brown:It's Brene Brown. The fans go wild. I want that to be my ringtone, Brene Brown. We are speaking at a time we're almost done. Two games to go. So many of us have lived every one of the 87 emotions that you have defined in your remarkable book, Atlas of the Heart. How have you experienced the whole thing? I'm so freaking tired. I was in London and Glasgow for work. So I'm up with the suckers at 1 a.m. catching games. It was tough. What am I? I'm reminded of what it means to be human. That's my take on the World Cup. And I'm counting down Saturdays until University of Texas Longhorn football. And I've got my Liverpool kit on because I'm going to transition out of the World Cup to friendlies in Nashville, Chicago, and New York.

1:54Brené Brown:Always be selling. I love, I love, I love. By the way, when the United States crapped the bed and lost, like the widest possible audience had tuned in at that point, the ones that made my heart break the most with the outer ring of casual interests were like, okay, I'm done. The NFL quarterbacks report to camp in two weeks, wake me up then, which I do understand. But you are an expert in so many of these. You feel these things deeply. For instance, when I watched England, who I have no emotional connection to now, Ovs. Where was them yesterday? Pivot from playing to win and then flick a switch and then play not to lose.

2:35What did you see? What did you feel? What did you experience in that moment?

2:38Brené Brown:You know, it's interesting. I've been listening to a lot of a commentary coming out of that game. I think people are implicitly talking about the playing to win versus playing not to lose, but I don't hear people explicitly talking about it. I mean, this was not about parking a bus. This was about building a bus barn. After that first goal, they had a choice of fight or fear. And you didn't see them make that choice until we went five back. And then they said the fight doors open. It's really interesting because when I work with sports teams, I always make this wager. If I had my back to the pitch or the field or the oval, and all I could do was listen to the emotional valence of the coaches and the people on the bench I could probably predict with fairly accuracy who's going to win or lose the number one driver of playing to not lose is emotion and it's negative valence let me just tell you a team like Argentina smells fear they're going to capitalize when I was at the the game where they came back from 2-0 down against Egypt and your beloved Mo Salah.

3:45It was crazy. The atmosphere in the stadium changed as soon as it went 2-1. They knew in that, they just scored once, they were still losing. But the whole team, the whole fan base, they knew they'd already won the game. And you've just explained why. I couldn't, I've never seen it before. They were still losing. They were still going out, but they smelt fear. They knew what was coming next. They knew.

4:04Brené Brown:A hundred percent. Didn't you know? I did, because I was the only person in the stadium left with his shirt on. I was just watching everybody else and it was over when england was up one nil but their behaviors changed and the bench changed i was like i'm turning this shit off i can't i mean one thing i have to say i told your lovely producer this that i'm so glad that i wasn't able to do any watch lives with wonder with my favorite people like you or trevor i'm not fit for human consumption in those situations my family leaves usually and they'll go to a different television i'm loud i'm scared I'm talking I'm passing you're letting it all out you're allowing yourself to be vulnerable I think there's two things that I want to get I want to talk to you about one is the plane to win versus plane not to lose which is a fight versus fear reaction um and we could get tech I would have a lot of technical questions about bus parking because I'm trying to I don't you know so much more about football than I do is that ever a long-term strategy or is that like a seven-minute strategy.

5:07It's cyclical. Like it's worked in football in times and then football moves on and it becomes the emphasis. It's always a balance. It has not worked for as long as they tried yesterday against a team who had not just so many skills, but just a berserker mindset that as soon as they felt that fear would be coming at that back line with knives in mouths and would be relentless. And that's what we saw. And I do want to get to that because I'm kind of fascinated by your whole understanding of Argentina. Because I'm pretty sure at this point, I'm a very rational man. What we've seen in this World Cup is just pure divine magic.

5:46But big picture, you posted, I think last week, a quote from a sports psychologist, Pippa Grange. She worked with the England team during the 2018 World Cup. You don't have to choose between being wholehearted, loving, kind and soulful or winning. You can do both. But the bridge you must cross is vulnerability. And I'm fascinated. I read that. I loved it. I wanted to know more from you. What moments, what players, what teams have lived those words in this tournament and allowed themselves to be vulnerable with the world watching?

6:18Brené Brown:Any team that comes on the pitch and gives it everything they have, when no one in the world thinks they have any chance of winning, is courageous and vulnerable and wholehearted. I mean, Kate Bird. Let's just start with the kit that we're all going to buy. I tell my kids this a lot. Both my kids were athletes, lots of sports in our house growing up. I often told them, because I wasn't raised this way, the moment you come home and look at me and say, I really want to make this team, mom. I don't know if I can make it, but I really want to make this team. Is the moment I look at them and say, God, I hope you make it.

6:49Brené Brown:You're going to have to bust your ass. But I just want you to know for me, the courage part's over. Because you want it. You want something and you're allowing yourself to tell the world you want it when you don't know if you're going to get it. The paradox there is to make the desire to win small so you hedge the bet if you don't get it is how you lose. But to look at the world and say, no, we want this. We get that no one knows how to pronounce where we are from or find it on a map. But, oh, we want this means that every heart around the world is cheering you on regardless of what kit they're wearing.

7:28Brené Brown:because we see ourselves in the courage to fight to win. There's macro moments like that around teams, I think, but there's also micro moments where you've seen several players talking about, yeah, I tried shutting myself off. I tried being tough. I tried doing the toxic masculinity thing. I needed a therapist, a psychologist to help me with the pressures of this game and it changed my life. Those are also singular moments of courage and winning to me. To hear that from these type of athletes, we don't know the number of lives that changes and saves. And it's not easy to say that. And so I look at Jude, who's one of my favorite.

8:07Jude Bellingham.

8:08Brené Brown:Yeah, come on. He's amazing. But why is he your favorite? What do you see in him? You see him talk about a values commitment of who he wants to be. Then you see the behaviors back it up. You see him stop and talk to a reporter who's in a wheelchair. You see him take his jacket off. You see the behaviors back up the values. The values are not professing. The values are practice. And I think it's important. You know, one of the things I thought we should talk about, because I always think of people are always saying, man, I saw you and Raj talking about collective effervescence. And that's, you know, it's such a cool concept.

8:45Brené Brown:One of the things I think we need to talk about or that I want to talk about with you is the fact that collective effervescence is neutral, has both generalize, generative trajectories where we experience this thing bigger than us and we get goosebumps and shivers and we know we're part of something and we know the research says that holds on to us even after the moment. But it is the same effervescence can also be destructive. Collective effervescence by definition as a construct is neutral. It depends on how it's loaded in. And I think one of the things that has been in addition to incredible joy from my perspective is the geopolitics of these games is really serious.

9:29Brené Brown:I'm a very serious Jesuit reader and there's a Jesuit cardinal, Cherny, who said, life is political, politics is how we live together and face our problems. We can't be non-political. And I don't think it's a part of the game that people love to talk about, but I would always say, if you really love the game, then you have to love the game for what it is. And some of these games are very serious politically. And as the world arrives in the United States for the biggest spectacle in sports. We're going coast to coast, host city to host city to meet the world with the Men in Blazers Match Day Live Tour.

10:04These are free college game day style live events taking place just before kickoff at some of the biggest games of the summer where we'll be taking the stage with celebrity guests in front of thousands of fans. It's going to be amazing. Come and be with us in person or from afar on YouTube but let's celebrate this some other way. It's meant to be celebrated. Just head to the events tab on meninblazers.com for all the details. To the football, to more together, courage. I think it's what gives the World Cup its true moment is that when teams take the field, the nation's histories, the nation's politics, the nation's cultures take the field alongside them.

10:43I mean, for Argentina, football is probably their greatest foreign policy. I mean, that's how they live it out. That's how the fans are living it out. It's remarkable to witness. But for collective effervescence, for those who didn't listen to the last interview, it's a theory. Durkheim was the thinker, right? I mean, how would you define it just so we're bringing the audience along and they fully understand? Because I've thought about you so many times during the tournament. Again, going back to the Argentina-Egypt game, to be in that crowd, new child with a woman who had not been to a game before ever.

11:16When Argentina scored around us, grown men and women were sobbing were hugging were throwing each other in the air it was a carnival of human emotion and she started tearing up and i turned around to her and i said you know you're not argentinian what are you feeling that you are sobbing in this moment and she said she found the power of their emotions so raw so beautiful to be overwhelming it was almost like she said it was like a great evangelical church and inside the stadium in that moment and i thought we because that is dictionary definition collective effervescence yeah i mean i think and that's

11:54Brené Brown:he was studying religious kind of religious ecstasy and trying to understand this thing that durkheim that he thought was like scary and magic and not explainable and so that's where he came up with this term it's interesting i wrote down kind of a core definition four structural features of it. Physical co-presence and bodily synchronous. So we're moving together and there's a physical co-presence. Shared focus of attention on a sacred object or symbol. An experience of emotion intensification and participants perceive as exceeding their individual emotional baseline or capability. So we're feeling emotions that we don't think about even being able to experience when we're alone.

12:38Brené Brown:And then the last one is a crystallization of that intensified emotion onto a symbol, which then becomes an emblem of group solidarity and moral consensus. You watch, for instance, Norway's fans rowing through stadia, you know, the Viking rope. What I saw that brought me to tears. I'm pretty sure now I'm Norwegian. Everyone's hitting 23andMe very, very hard. But it is a refraction of their true belief of their past and a very proud celebration of their present. An act that other fans were invited to join in. That was fascinating. Again, the poorest boundaries between these fan groups, which is very new for football.

13:18Football used to be like a zero-sum game. This was very much, in large part, a World Cup of Love. The chants of football have become far more, you know, defried from desire. And I'm sure a lot of these are now going to be an SEC stadium now in the wake of one of the gifts of the World Cup. But the Viking row, these game day customs, they're almost the rituals of positive collective effervescence.

13:40Brené Brown:I would say the row, yes. And my emotional moment from Norway is when the team returned and everyone gathered to celebrate them in row. What did you see then? It was just gratitude. What I would say, and this is a really important part of this, I think, is the chance can be beautiful and generative and the chance can be terrible and hateful and racist. And so I think we have to remember, because I think Americans don't have historical context for some of what they're seeing. I saw this Instagram that said, everything you have to know about Messi. And I was like, let's go. And I was watching it and I slid the carousel over.

14:25Brené Brown:It was about some really dangerous origins of the Argentinian constitution. So what you're seeing is people who don't understand history, not understanding fully that when you see Argentinians screaming and crying, that is not all about football. I'll tell you, just to be honest with you, the Argentina-Egypt game, and I know you can attribute some of it to my massive love for Mo Salah. It's nice to see him happy again, by the way. It is. It's, oh my God, yes. But that game was tough for me. I saw a meme on social media that said, to all the women out there, I hope one day someone looks at you like FIFA looks at Argentina.

15:10Brené Brown:And it was interesting because I read an article in Al Jazeera a couple of days ago, because I'm trying to follow the World Cup from all different news outlets. They talked about the five biggest political pieces of the World Cup. And they're different by region. So theirs is the Somali referee not being able to get in. Two, the red card pull by Trump. Three is what they call the VAR vexation on Egypt and Argentina game. Ticket prices and hydration breaks. These are kind of what their political perspective. I will tell you about the red card and Balogun. This is what's really interesting from a sports performance mindset.

15:45Brené Brown:The Inner Game of Tennis is a book that's 50 years old. I read it every year. Tim Kelleway. Yes. I've played tennis for probably as long as it's been a lot that, oh, I have actually played tennis longer than the book has been written, but I read it every year. It's a classic. The formula in that book that I teach leaders all over the world is P equals P minus I performance equals potential minus interference. So a lot of times when I'm working with a team and they're just drilling skills, drilling potential without addressing interference. And interference is huge for me as a former athlete. So like right now, if I'm playing pickleball or tennis and somebody calls the ball out when it was clearly in, I'm gonna lose that game.

16:23Brené Brown:That becomes such mental interference to me that I couldn't win. If they played with their feet, they're gonna beat me because I'm so pissed off, I'm not gonna win. So working on interference with high-performance athletes is huge. I don't think we can ever underestimate for the US team the interference on performance that was created when Trump and FIFA changed that call, that card. And now you're hearing Belligan talk about it for the first time, that he didn't understand the impact in the locker room until he actually saw it on game day. And I'll tell you an interesting story. I was working, I was again, I was in London.

16:59Brené Brown:The next morning, someone's staying in my hotel who was a huge World Cup fan. I said, you go out? And he said, yeah, I watched the game out, but not in my kit. And I said, why? And he said, really hard to be over here and support the U.S. team after that interference. Sports is not just, I use it because I'm a leadership researcher, but like sports is not just leadership theater. Sports is life theater. And what we're willing to talk about and what we're not willing to talk about is very indicative of where we sit on how good we got it. I don't know who's in your pocket, but we did not doom ourselves.

17:33Brené Brown:The call by FIFA and Trump doomed us. Speaking to one of the players, I said this on our show, he said that the US team was just flying. They felt beloved. They felt the nation were behind them, felt magnificent country roads. And then suddenly, almost overnight, they took the field that day and realized the world hated them. That vibe shift, just that's where they were zombies on the field. They could not cope with that complete. It was like leaving the sauna and being in a cold plunge pool emotionally. I think that's true. I think, look, here's what you can't do unless you really want to piss me off.

18:10Brené Brown:You cannot tell me that the 12th man matters and then tell me it doesn't. It either does or doesn't. In terms of social science and research, we know it does. I'd like to call it the 12th person, but I'll confuse people. We know the 12th person matters. We know the fans matter. We know it across sport. So if that's true, then an intervention of that magnitude and then U.S. fans feeling like, oh, God, was that fair? And then the world being like, that's not OK. That changed it for us. As a former athlete who raised athletes, no one would hate an unfair advantage more than a player. Players are like, I have trained my entire life for this.

18:50Brené Brown:I want the victory to be ours. So we've got Flo Balogun coming on over the weekend. Again, so you are giving me much to think about in terms of what we discuss. He's handled himself with, I think, an incredible dignity in one of the most complex situations possible. But watching him at the end go up to the opposing coach, the Belgian coach, and just apologize was in defeat, especially the end of his journey was was an incredibly noble and really empathetic moment. What would you ask him? What would I ask him? I don't know. he's in a very difficult situation. I would say, let me tune in to Men in Blazers and see what they're saying.

19:34Brené Brown:I don't, I don't, I don't know because I'm looking at it from such a systemic macro perspective. Can I ask a question? Like, I don't know whether I want to ask it or not. I'm nervous about asking it. Should the U.S. have not played him? This is another dimension to the whole thing is, is that the way we played it, Mauricio Pochettino chose to lean into it. You know, his press conference, he said, we celebrate this, we celebrate this. He jumped on, you know, jumped onto it, validated it. I think missed that input that you just gave in terms of the potentially corrosive effect. There's a fair play spirit where that would have occurred.

20:12But I think there was so much political back-channeling going on at that point. I imagine they had no leverage but to play him. But yes, I mean, that was a thing. That's what a lot of people outside of here have said. At the end of the day, they could have just knit this very strange situation. The frustrating thing is they probably could have, this was a team they could have beaten. And to see them then, the negative effects that you've articulated, a theory as to why, it's probably the most painful of all to see us just take the field as a zombie team and to implode and exit without a fight.

20:46But the United States were out. But the nation, I've got to say, we've had in this different potential possibilities. We've had a fairly incredible World Cup. World Cups, we talked about it when you were last on. They are global eclipses. They do cast a shadow across the entire world. But this one, being here, we're firmly in its path. We're part of it. You know, not just as participants, but as hosts. and watching the world live out our, you know, our buckies, our waffle houses, our in and out burgers. And I'm not, you know, I'm not laughing at this. I found it quite profound and beautiful. It felt more than ever, Brene, that America really needed this.

21:25We needed to be loved and to show the world that we can love them back.

21:29Brené Brown:Closing the Belgian point, I'm not sure it's fair to believe, to your point, that the coach could make that call. So I do want to go on the record as saying, I don't know that we could have the coach make the call whether to play him or not. I just, it's complicated. In terms of what we needed, we hosted games like in Houston. I almost ran over three Dutch people at Chick-fil-A line because they were not sure how that triple drive-through engineering feat worked. But I was just going for my crispy Diet Coke. Welcome to Texas. Yeah, my favorite meme, there's so many good memes, is the World Cup for the Americans was like the best sleepover of your childhood with your cousins who you never get to see because the parents don't get along.

22:13I was so sad to see everybody leave.