India won the T20 World Cup on Sunday. And a strange thing happened on social media: people started asking why it’s not like before. The answer has almost nothing to do with cricket.
The two tweets came within minutes of India lifting the T20 World Cup trophy. One read: “this win isn’t even 1% of that” followed by a clip from the 2011 final. Another said: “It’s also to do with the format and frequency of the World Cup. The biennial isn’t that special anymore.”
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Both observations are correct. But they are symptoms of a much larger shift—a shift that intersects economics, psychology, postcolonial theory, and the strange inner life of a nation no longer sure it needs sports to tell it who it is.
THE RUNNING MILE THAT’S GOING NOWHERE
Indian fan celebrates T20 World Cup triumph in Mumbai (PTI Photo)
The first explanation is the most intuitive and comes from behavioral economics. In 1971, psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell published an article entitled Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society in which they introduced what is now widely known as the hedonic treadmill. The central finding was simple: people adapt to positive experiences. The joy produced by any given event diminishes with repetition, regardless of the objective quality of the event. What seemed extraordinary the first time feels ordinary the fifth time.
India have won four ICC titles in the last five years. Research into the physiology of sports fandom has confirmed that watching your team win triggers a dopamine release comparable to personal accomplishments. However, hedonic adaptation theory predicts that this emotional upheaval will diminish once the outcome becomes routine. The tip requires unexpectedness. When India wins regularly, winning becomes the bottom line. And you can’t feel elevated from your baseline.
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Murray and Fazio (2014), writing in PLOS ONE, demonstrated the physiological reality of this. Fan victories produce real neurological excitement and activate the same pathways associated with personal achievement. The hedonic treadmill framework explains why this response diminishes over time. This is not because the brain stops registering a win, but because adaptation gradually narrows the gap between expectation and outcome.
So the Twitter user who pointed out the frequency was partially right. The problem is not only that the World Cup is held every two years. India no longer lose often enough to make wins special.
SPORT AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF NATIONAL ANXIETY
Hedonic adaptation explains personal response. A more interesting question is a collective one. Why did 1983 feel the way it did? Why did a billion people hold their breath in 2011 in a way they simply didn’t last night?
A large body of research on the economics of sport has shown that a country’s success in elite sport is closely linked to its economic resources. Bosscher et al. (2008) in their study of Olympic performance across nations found that wealth measured as GDP per capita is among the strongest predictors of athletic success at major international competitions. Nations with greater resources invest more in elite sports infrastructure, coaching and athlete development. The richer the country, the better equipped to win.
However, John Manuel Luiz and Riyas Fadal (2011), who studied the performance of African nations at the Beijing Olympics, made a finer point. For developing countries, sporting success should be understood in relation to their economic resources precisely because the gap between what they can spend and what they achieve reveals how much sport means to them. Elite sport, they argued, is actually a luxury good. Its demand increases with development. In other words, even if a country is poor, it will find ways to invest in the one arena where it can compete with the world.
India in 1983 was still a low-income, controlled economy far less confident about its place in the world than it is today. And then, on a Sunday afternoon at Lord’s that year, Kapil Dev caught Viv Richards on a boundary and a nation that didn’t expect him to win suddenly did. The tears that followed were not about cricket. They were about something older and more urgent: the need to be seen.
THE NATIONAL QUESTION AND THE JOY OF LOSS
A 2024 paper published in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies goes even further. Its author, Anuranj, uses philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s concept of a “national cause” to analyze Indian cricket. Žižek argues that collective enjoyment in nationalist sport is not just about pride. It works around the idea of loss. As the article explains, the concept “postulates that resorting to nationalism can create a situation of pleasure in pain and induce an extreme ‘joy’ (jouissance) that operates on the idea of a sudden sense of loss.” The emotional charge is highest when the stakes feel existential.
This explains something pure economics cannot: why the India-Pakistan match is still different. This fixture carries the weight of Partition, three wars and seventy-five years of unresolved history. Losing to Pakistan is not just about losing a cricket match. It becomes a referendum on something bigger. About whether history has been kind to us. About whether our choices as a nation were justified. Existential stakes remain intact. And so the emotional charge remains intact.
India versus Australia in the T20 final carries none of these historical burdens. It’s more and more simply a sport. And sport, when it is only sport, produces a different and quieter form of joy.
CRICKET AS AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY AND WHAT HAS REPLACED IT
Sociologist Pamela Devan argued in Sport in Society (2012) that cricket’s influence on Indian identity was built precisely on the absence of other unifying forces. India is too vast, too linguistically fragmented and too internally diverse to be easily bound together by a single cultural identity. Cricket stepped into this vacuum. As Devan put it, the sport created an “imaginary community”, a space where a Tamilian, a Punjabi and a Kashmiri could temporarily share the same emotional experience and call it national.
This feature hasn’t gone away. But now he has company.
India wins Bollywood films at Cannes. The space program that landed on the South Pole of the Moon before anyone else. The diaspora that runs Fortune 500 companies and shapes American politics. A place at the G20 table that the country not only occupies, but leads. The image of the country is now being built from multiple directions simultaneously. Cricket is no longer the only mainstay.
Devan’s argument was written before Chandrayaan-3, before India’s presidency of the G20 and before the global moment India’s soft power is experiencing. Still, it clearly anticipated the logic. Once cricket is no longer the only arena in which India can take on the world, it ceases to carry this unique emotional weight. The imagined community it creates becomes one community among many rather than the only one that matters.
WHAT IPL HAS DONE TO THE SAINT
Photo by PTI
There’s one more variable, and it’s the most obvious one: the Indian Premier League. Souvik Naha (2015), in a historical study of cricket’s convergence with India’s entertainment and glamor industries over the century from 1913 to 2013, documented how cricket and entertainment became “inextricably linked deeper and wider than commentators admit”. Each borrowed the brand value and consumption logic of the other. The IPL is the most complete expression of this convergence. It’s a product designed for entertainment, with franchises, auctions, cheerleaders and a broadcast calendar designed to maximize viewership throughout the year.
Before the IPL, the cricket calendar had a natural deficiency. The World Cup was a festival. It was rare, festive and shared. Families gathered. The streets emptied. The match was an event in the original sense of the word, something that interrupted the mundane. That interruption added weight to it.
Now cricket is a stream. There is always a match, franchise, transfer window or auction. The cricket is available as ambient noise is available, ever-present and therefore largely unperceived. IPL also did something more subtle. It redistributed emotional loyalties. When you look after your franchise for four months, infusing tribal energy into Mumbai Indians or Chennai Super Kings, the national team becomes one of many.
Daniel Wann’s (2006) seminal team identification research demonstrated that the emotional intensity of a victory is proportional to how much of your identity you have invested in the outcome. For fifteen years, the IPL has been quietly distributing this investment.
WHAT ARRIVAL DOES HE ACTUALLY FEEL
Put it all together and you get a picture that is more hopeful than meets the eye.
The intensity with which a country celebrates a sporting victory is inversely proportional to how safe it feels in the world. German fans don’t cry like Argentine fans. Americans are largely indifferent to their Olympic medal count in a way that smaller, more anxious nations are not. England’s relationship with football remains a telling exception. It is a country still processing imperial decline, still unsure of its post-Brexit identity and still searching for a victory that might tell it something about itself that it cannot resolve elsewhere.
India is moving along the same curve. Not until the end. The match against Pakistan continues to prove that. But it moves.
The Anuranj paper states this exactly. The ‘national cause’ in Indian cricket is still most strongly activated when the match carries existential stakes. For everything else, the jouissance darkened. Not because Indians care less about cricket, but because the sport no longer carries the full burden of national self-esteem.
The calm after a T20 win, a shrug and a smile, a quick rush of dopamine and then back into the evening, is not apathy. It’s not ungratefulness. It is not a generation that could care less about cricket.
It feels like being a country that no longer needs validation.
The generations that cried in 1983 cried because they were hungry. Because the country was worried about its place in the world. Because the cricket match was the only arena where India could beat anyone on the global stage and winning there meant something that had nothing to do with cricket.
You don’t need that anymore. India doesn’t need it anymore. And most countries, most peoples throughout history, never get to the point where they can say that.
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– The end
Issued by:
Akshay Ramesh
Published on:
March 9, 2026 10:58 PM IST
