On the night when Argentina played Egypt last week, 38-year-old auto-rickshaw driver Shariful Islam was watching the match at a roadside tea stall in Cumilla as Lionel Messi missed a penalty. He turned to a young man standing nearby, an Argentina supporter, and made a jibe about it—something to the effect that even the man’s father could not have scored that goal. Within minutes, Shariful was being beaten. When he tried to take shelter in a nearby mess, he was beaten again. He collapsed outside the shop and did not survive.
Shariful had moved to Cumilla from Nilphamari eight months earlier with his wife and two young daughters, hoping to save enough money to enrol them in a better school. By his family’s account, he was actually a Brazil supporter who was merely cheering for Egypt that evening. In any case, he had no real stake in the rivalry that killed him. But Shariful is now one of at least 11 people who have died in Bangladesh so far in connection to the ongoing Fifa World Cup 2026.
Of the other 10, three were stabbed to death, three were electrocuted while putting up their favourite team’s flag, one was killed in a motorcycle rally accident, one by a heart attack, and two in other football-related incidents.
Of course, this is not a new phenomenon in Bangladesh. A study published in July 2024 in the Journal of Injury and Violence Research (led by researchers at Dhaka’s Biomedical Research Foundation with a co-author from the University of Bonn), examined newspaper reports from the 2022 Fifa World Cup and documented 23 deaths, 35 hospitalisations, and 45 other injuries across more than 15 districts in Bangladesh. Falls while hoisting flags accounted for the largest share of fatalities. Heart attacks during tense matches came next. Murders following disputes between rival teams’ supporters and accidents during celebrations each made up roughly a fifth of deaths.
The researchers argued that a core driver here was a powerful sense of group identity, which led fans to treat the successes and failures of geographically distant teams as deeply personal experiences. This intense emotional attachment often manifested as fanaticism, resulting in tragic outcomes such as seven deaths from falls while hoisting flags on rooftops and six fatal heart attacks triggered by the extreme mental stress of critical match moments or team losses. Social media discourse further amplifies such identification, providing a platform for tribalism and cyberbullying that frequently escalates into real-world violence, including five murders resulting from stabbings and altercations between rival supporters. Additionally, the study mentions five fans who died in other accidents during match viewings or celebrations, illustrating how the “sociology of emotion” and performative loyalty can transform sporting passion into preventable loss of life.
Meanwhile, a German study following the 2006 Fifa World Cup found more than twice the normal rate of acute cardiovascular events among fans watching high-stakes matches, particularly men with existing heart disease.
Sporting outcomes have also been linked to mental health. France’s 1998 World Cup triumph coincided with a decline in suicides, while Iran’s group-stage elimination in 2014 was associated with an increase in suicide attempts.
Something resembling the latter happened in Bangladesh last week, too. In Kushtia, a 19-year-old named Ratan watched Brazil’s elimination alongside his father and brother, both Argentina supporters, and reportedly began behaving strangely soon after the final whistle. The following morning, he had locked himself inside his room and, by the time his family broke down the door, he had reportedly taken his own life. He left behind a young daughter.
Notably, two of the aforementioned Bangladeshi researchers had previously documented a cluster of suicides among Bangladeshi and Indian supporters following Argentina’s elimination from the 2018 Fifa World Cup.
It is tempting to conclude from such cases that football itself is the problem. But that explanation quickly runs into an obvious contradiction. Billions of people watch the same tournament around the world, experience the same victories and defeats. Yet very few countries repeatedly produce headlines like these. Football may explain the trigger, but it does not fully explain the fuse.
The 2022 Fifa World Cup study itself offers another important clue. Every one of the 23 people who died during that tournament was male, with a median age of just 20. That pattern does not prove that young men are inherently more violent or emotionally unstable. It does, however, raise difficult questions about how boys and young men in Bangladesh are socialised to deal with disappointment, humiliation, and conflict.
Research has long shown that many men are encouraged to suppress vulnerability while treating anger as a more socially acceptable emotion. Studies on masculinity and mental health in Bangladesh likewise suggest that prevailing ideals of manhood continue to prize toughness, self-control, being the “provider,” and defending one’s honour. Those expectations do not inevitably produce violence, but they can leave many young men with fewer socially acceptable ways of expressing fear, grief, or emotional distress. When those pressures are combined with intense group identity, public rivalry, and instant validation from social media, a football match can become something much more serious than a game.
However, Bangladeshis do not reserve their tempers exclusively for Messi or Ronaldo. People come to blows over a seat on a bus, being served late at a wedding feast, local political rivalries, and cricket matches just as readily as they do over football. The common thread is not the issue itself, but the alarming speed with which seemingly trivial disagreements escalate into serious confrontations.
How these incidents are reported is another issue. As journalists, we report the trigger and stop there, as though the size of the excuse explains the size of the tragedy. But in reality, a missed penalty does not ordinarily provoke murder. A foreign team’s defeat does not ordinarily end in suicide. When such outcomes occur, they point to deeper questions about emotional wellbeing, conflict resolution, social pressures, and the ways in which respect and humiliation are negotiated in everyday life. Take football away, and the same short fuse would almost certainly find another spark.
None of this means football should be ignored, nor would that be possible. The authors of the 2022 study proposed several sensible interventions: discouraging people from hoisting flags from rooftops and other dangerous heights, warning supporters with existing heart issues about the risks of highly stressful matches, promoting more responsible behaviour on social media, and encouraging families to keep a closer eye on relatives they already know to be emotionally vulnerable.
While such measures could save lives, they would not solve the larger problem. Preventing the next World Cup tragedy requires looking beyond the tournament itself and creating healthier ways for young people (especially young men) to deal with disappointment and conflict, expanding access to mental health support, teaching emotional regulation and conflict resolution from an early age, and ensuring that violence carries real and legal consequences. After all, violence perceived to carry little consequence amid the frenzy of fan rivalry is more likely to recur.
The 2026 Fifa World Cup will end in a week. The flags will come down soon after, the arguments will fade, and attention will shift elsewhere. But unless we confront the deeper social and emotional vulnerabilities that the associated tragedies expose, we will have learned nothing from the lives lost.
Jannatul Naym Pieal is a writer, researcher, and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries, and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.
