Ever thought your football team might be under a curse like Ted Lasso’s? Here’s how to lift it | Helen Pilcher
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- Mayo GAA won the All-Ireland Gaelic football final recently, ending a curse a local priest placed after their 1951 title that declared they could not win another final until every member of that squad had died.
- Paddy Prendergast, the last surviving member of Mayo's 1951 team, died in 2021; between 1952 and the 2025 final, Mayo reached 11 finals and lost all of them.
- Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, citing family ties to Mayo, announced on X after the victory: "The curse is broken."
- Birmingham City is said to have endured decades of disappointment under a 100-year hex placed on its home ground in 1906; manager Barry Fry reportedly tried lifting it by urinating on the pitch's four corners.
- 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.
- Philip Hurst and colleagues at Canterbury Christ Church University found runners given an inert supplement they were told would harm their sprint actually ran slower — but told it would improve performance, the effect was minimal, suggesting negative expectations outweigh positive ones in sport.
- Former Mayo player Colm Boyle said after the win: "The shackles are off," illustrating how a shared curse narrative becomes team identity and how a victory rewrites the expectation feedback loop.
Why it matters: Mayo's 11 finals lost over 75 years show how a single belief — a priest's curse — became self-fulfilling through social contagion among players, fans and media. Hurst's research implies negative expectations actively damage athletes more than positive ones help, so rituals like Fry's pitch-urination or Ted Lasso's cleansing fire function as psychological resets. The win hands Mayo's next generation a fundamentally different team story to inherit.
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