Sports Superstitions, Lucky Rituals and Famous Jinxes

If your team is winning and you refuse to move from the exact spot where you’ve been sitting, you already understand sports superstition. It doesn’t matter that you’re watching from a couch hundreds of miles away. Your team scored while you were sitting there, so getting up now feels like a completely unnecessary risk.

Athletes can be even worse. One player needs the same meal before every game. Another puts the left sock on first. A baseball team won’t mention the no-hitter happening right in front of them, while hockey players can go through an entire playoff run without shaving because nobody wants to change anything while the wins keep coming.

Sports are almost perfect conditions for superstition. You can prepare for months and still lose because of one bad bounce, a missed penalty, an umpire’s call or an opponent having the game of their life. When so much matters and you can’t control all of it, a lucky shirt or specific routine can start to feel surprisingly important.

Why are athletes so superstitious?

Imagine you wear a particular pair of socks and play brilliantly. You wear them again and win. By the third game, changing socks starts to feel like you’re personally asking for trouble.

That’s one of the easiest ways a sports superstition begins. Something goes well, you notice what you did beforehand and the two become connected. It doesn’t matter that you also stretched, trained, slept properly and spent years getting good at the sport. Somehow the socks get promoted.

Psychologist Stuart Vyse discusses this pattern in an American Psychological Association interview about superstition. Athletes are particularly vulnerable to these beliefs because performance involves pressure, uncertainty and plenty of time to think about what might go wrong.

There can also be a psychological benefit without anything supernatural happening. A familiar ritual can settle your nerves, help you concentrate and make the moments before a competition feel more predictable. The lucky object hasn’t changed the opposition or the score. It has changed how comfortable you feel walking into the situation.

That fits with the wider way superstitions work. The action gives you something to do when part of the outcome has moved beyond your control.

A routine isn’t automatically a superstition

This distinction matters in sport because athletes repeat almost everything.

A tennis player bouncing the ball before serving can be using a routine to control timing and concentration. A hockey player stretching in the same order every night may simply know what prepares their body properly, or a goalkeeper checking both posts before kick-off could be making sure the goal is set up correctly.

It starts looking more like superstition when the person believes changing the routine could affect the result for reasons that have nothing to do with performance. The socks have to be the same pair because you won last time. You can’t step on the white line because you’ll play badly. Nobody can mention what the pitcher is doing because saying it aloud could make the next batter get a hit.

Plenty of athletes describe their habits as routines rather than superstitions, and there’s no reason to argue with them. What matters here are the cases where luck, jinxes or a feared bad outcome are actually part of the explanation.

Baseball might be the perfect sport for superstition

Baseball gives you an enormous amount of time to become superstitious. Players repeat the same actions over and over, success can disappear without warning, and a hitter can do almost everything right and still fail most of the time.

That has produced some wonderfully specific rules. Players avoid stepping on the foul line when entering or leaving the field. Batters repeat the same movements before every pitch. Teams turn their caps inside out when they need a late comeback. Winning streaks can result in the same food, clothes and seats being used game after game.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame describes baseball as a game packed with ritual and records players avoiding foul lines and giving a pitcher the silent treatment during a no-hitter.

Whatever you do, don’t say no-hitter

This might be baseball’s most famous jinx. If a pitcher hasn’t allowed a single hit and the game is still going, you’re not supposed to say it.

As the innings pass, teammates can start avoiding the pitcher in the dugout. Broadcasters find increasingly creative ways to tell viewers what’s happening without using the forbidden words. Fans know perfectly well why everyone has suddenly become awkward.

MLB has documented just how seriously the rule can be treated. During John Means’ 2021 no-hitter for Baltimore, teammates changed where they sat, avoided talking to him and tried not to disturb anything that was happening. Several Orioles later described the superstitions that developed as the game continued.

Of course, saying “no-hitter” can’t make the next batter suddenly hit the ball. That hasn’t stopped generations of baseball people deciding there’s no benefit in testing it.

It’s the sports version of knocking on wood after saying something is going well. You’ve acknowledged the good thing out loud, and now it feels as though you’ve given fate an opportunity to embarrass you.

Wade Boggs and the chicken dinner

Some athletes build one ritual. Baseball Hall of Famer Wade Boggs built what sounds more like a timetable.

Boggs became famous for eating chicken before games after connecting the meal with an early successful performance. He also followed long pre-game routines, avoided stepping on the foul line in particular situations and wrote the Hebrew word chai, meaning life, in the dirt before batting.

Vyse discusses Boggs in the APA’s examination of superstition as an especially clear example of how one successful result can turn an ordinary action into something a player feels compelled to repeat.

Canadian hockey has the playoff beard

If your hockey team reaches the playoffs and normally clean-shaven players suddenly start growing increasingly questionable beards, you’re looking at one of the NHL’s best-known superstitions.

The rule is simple enough. Once the playoffs begin, you stop shaving. The beard stays until your team wins the Stanley Cup or gets knocked out.

The New York Islanders are usually credited with turning the playoff beard into the tradition we know today during their run of Stanley Cup success beginning in 1980. NHL.com traces the tradition through Islanders players including Ken Morrow, whose beard remained while teammates gradually joined him.

The logic is familiar. You’re winning, so don’t change anything. By the time several rounds have passed, shaving can feel as dangerous as changing a lucky jersey halfway through a streak.

The tradition spread far beyond the Islanders and now reaches players, coaches and fans. Not everyone growing one believes the facial hair has any influence over the puck, but once the playoff beard becomes part of the run, taking a razor to it before elimination would feel very wrong indeed.

Canada even has a lucky coin under the ice

Canada has another hockey superstition that began with an ordinary one-dollar coin.

Before the hockey tournament at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Canadian icemaker Trent Evans placed a loonie beneath the centre-ice faceoff spot. Both the Canadian women’s and men’s teams went on to win gold.

That was enough to create the Lucky Loonie legend. Hockey Canada records later loonies being hidden at international competitions, and the idea became so closely connected with Canadian sporting luck that the Royal Canadian Mint began producing special Lucky Loonie coins for Canadian Olympic and Paralympic teams.

The Royal Canadian Mint traces the tradition back to the 2002 Olympic ice and notes that lucky loonies have since appeared under curling sheets, in baseball diamonds and on basketball equipment.

The coin didn’t score either gold-medal-winning goal, obviously. But after two Canadian hockey teams won with one hidden beneath the ice, nobody was going to complain when it turned up again.

Footballers have lucky numbers, lucky positions and very specific exits

Football has no shortage of players who want to enter the pitch in a certain way, wear a particular item or be the last person out of the dressing room.

Former Arsenal defender Kolo Touré took being last onto the pitch so seriously that it once earned him a booking. During a Champions League match in 2009, teammate William Gallas was receiving treatment at half-time. Touré waited for him because his superstition required him to be the final Arsenal player back onto the field.

The referee restarted without them. When Touré eventually ran back on without permission, he was booked. Touré later told UEFA that being last onto the pitch was one of his superstitions.

That’s a particularly good example of a superstition becoming inconvenient. Following the rule was so important that even a yellow card didn’t stop him waiting.

Brazilian coach Mário Zagallo loved the number 13

If you’ve grown up hearing that 13 is unlucky, Brazilian football legend Mário Zagallo had no interest in agreeing with you.

Zagallo considered 13 a lucky number and looked for ways to bring it into his life and football. UEFA technical director Andy Roxburgh recalled that the World Cup-winning Brazilian coach believed strongly in its power and regarded it as a good omen. UEFA has recorded Zagallo’s attachment to the number 13 as one of football’s better-known superstitions.

It’s a useful contrast with the fear of Friday the 13th in much of the English-speaking world. Numbers don’t arrive with good or bad luck already attached. People and cultures give them those reputations.

Seven has picked up the opposite reputation in many places and is widely treated as fortunate, something you can read more about in the meaning and symbolism of the number 7. That doesn’t mean wearing a seven on your back gives you an advantage, but it helps explain why athletes can become attached to particular numbers in the first place.

England players are still superstitious now

Football superstition isn’t something you have to dig through old dressing-room stories to find. Current England players are still doing plenty of things before matches that they openly describe as superstitions.

Jordan Pickford has kept the same warm-up since he was a teenager

England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford is even more direct about it. He describes himself as superstitious and says his warm-up has barely changed since he was about fourteen or fifteen.

In a 2025 interview with England Football, Pickford explained that once he steps onto the grass before a game, he wants his routine done the same way and at the same times.

There’s obviously a practical side to a goalkeeper repeating a familiar warm-up. The superstitious part is the feeling that the sequence itself shouldn’t be disturbed. After more than a decade of doing it one way, choosing an important England match to suddenly experiment would probably feel like a terrible idea.

Alessia Russo jumps seven times before kick-off

Alessia Russo has one of the more specific England rituals. Before kick-off, she jumps exactly seven times.

The Arsenal and England striker told England Football in March 2026 that she had become less superstitious as she got older, but the seven jumps had somehow stuck. She couldn’t remember exactly where the habit came from.

Seven already has a long reputation as a lucky number, although Russo hasn’t claimed that’s why she chose it. You can read more about why the number has picked up that reputation in the meaning of the number 7.

That uncertainty about where the ritual started actually makes it a good example of how sports superstitions survive. You do something once, then again, and eventually it becomes part of match day even though you can’t remember making a conscious decision to start.

France’s 1998 World Cup team had one very shiny lucky charm

Before matches during France’s victorious 1998 World Cup campaign, defender Laurent Blanc kissed goalkeeper Fabien Barthez on his bald head.

What could have remained a joke became part of the team’s pre-match routine as France kept winning. Blanc even repeated it before the final despite being suspended and unable to play.

Blanc later described it as his own little superstition when discussing the various routines footballers develop. ESPN has documented the head-kissing ritual alongside other unusual pre-match habits.

Once again, the sequence matters more than the logic. Kiss head, win game. Repeat. Keep winning. By the final, stopping would have seemed far stranger than continuing.

Cricket has enough superstitions for an entire team

Cricket gives baseball serious competition when it comes to athletes becoming attached to lucky objects and routines. A batter can spend hours waiting to go in, then spend another long stretch alone at the crease where one mistake ends the innings. There’s plenty of time for your brain to decide the red handkerchief in your pocket is helping.

The best part is how international the examples are.

Sachin Tendulkar put his left pad on first

Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar has openly discussed his habit of putting on his left batting pad before the right one. He also became reluctant to give up favourite bats, repairing them when necessary rather than moving on to something new.

Tendulkar spoke about the superstition himself in 2016, explaining that the left pad went on first and that he would repair favourite bats in his hotel room so he could keep using them.

It’s a tiny action, which is exactly why it works so well as a superstition. Putting the left pad on first costs nothing. Once you’ve done it for years, suddenly choosing the right one first before an important innings would feel almost deliberately provocative.

Steve Waugh carried a red rag

Australian captain Steve Waugh had a lucky object rather than a dressing order. He carried a small red cloth in his pocket while batting.

According to Waugh, it became important during the 1993 Ashes Test at Leeds. He used the cloth to wipe away sweat while he was in the 60s, went on to score a century and kept carrying it for the rest of his career.

ESPN’s examination of why cricketers become superstitious uses Waugh’s red rag as a perfect example. He did something ordinary, played brilliantly afterwards and suddenly the object had a job.

South Africa had a bat stuck to the ceiling

South African batter Neil McKenzie ended up with a superstition because his teammates played a joke on him.

They taped his bat to the dressing-room ceiling before an innings. McKenzie then scored a century. Unfortunately for anyone hoping the joke was finished, success had now given the ceiling a reputation.

He began repeating the practice, taping his bat to the ceiling because the ridiculous thing had happened before a successful innings. ESPN records it among the many rituals and superstitions used by international cricketers.

That might be one of the clearest examples of how arbitrary a lucky ritual can be. Nobody needed an ancient legend explaining the supernatural importance of ceilings. He scored a hundred. That was enough.

West Indies great Frank Worrell changed everything after a duck

Bad luck can create a superstition just as easily as success.

West Indies cricket great Sir Frank Worrell was dismissed for a first-ball duck against Australia in 1951. According to an account later recalled by Sir Learie Constantine, Worrell responded by changing every piece of clothing he had been wearing.

The idea was straightforward enough. The old clothes had been there for the bad result, so they were going. ESPN includes the story in its look at cricket superstition, which ranges across players from the Caribbean, Australia, England, India and South Africa.

Björn Borg didn’t like changing anything at Wimbledon

Swedish tennis legend Björn Borg looked almost unnaturally calm on court. Behind that calm was an impressive collection of things he preferred to keep exactly the same.

At Wimbledon he became associated with using the same hotel, travelling the same route, keeping to the same routines and refusing to shave during the tournament. Even his preferred chair beside the umpire mattered.

The ATP describes Borg as massively superstitious, noting his insistence on the same chair and the particular way he arranged his racquets and towels.

It worked out rather well from his point of view. Borg won Wimbledon five years in a row between 1976 and 1980. That obviously doesn’t prove the chair had anything to do with it, but five consecutive titles aren’t exactly the sort of result that encourages a superstitious player to experiment with a different seat.

There’s an obvious similarity with the superstitions performers follow before going onstage. Athletes and actors both prepare for a live performance where nerves matter, mistakes can’t always be undone and everybody is watching when something goes wrong.

Japanese Little League players found luck in a teammate’s head

Good-luck rituals don’t have to survive for centuries before people start repeating them.

At the 2017 Little League World Series, the Japanese team had a much newer lucky charm. Players rubbed teammate Ryuto Konno’s shaved head for good luck.

MLB documented the Japanese team’s ritual alongside players from other countries carrying coins, eating the same sweets and repeating particular game-day habits.

Nothing about a shaved head naturally promises a baseball win. But once a team decides something is lucky and everyone joins in, it can quickly become part of how they prepare together.

Fans can be just as superstitious as the people playing

You don’t need to be on the field to believe you’ve found the one thing keeping the result together.

Fans wear lucky jerseys, sit in the same seat, take the same route to the stadium and refuse to wash something during a winning streak. If the team starts a comeback while you’re standing in the kitchen, you may suddenly find yourself watching the rest of the game from beside the fridge.

Baseball fans are particularly famous for worrying about jinxes, but the habit turns up across sports. You’ll hear someone tell another fan not to celebrate too early, not to mention how long is left or not to say that the goalkeeper hasn’t conceded yet.

It’s the same uncomfortable feeling behind crossing your fingers when you desperately want something to go your way. You know you aren’t controlling the result, but sitting there doing absolutely nothing about it somehow feels worse.

Sports curses can last for decades

A personal superstition might disappear when the player retires. A good sports curse can keep an entire fan base miserable for generations.

The Curse of the Bambino

The Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees after the 1919 season. What followed gave baseball one of its most famous curse stories.

Boston had been one of baseball’s dominant teams, but after Ruth left, the Red Sox didn’t win another World Series until 2004. The 86-year wait became known as the Curse of the Bambino, with every painful near miss making the story feel a little more convincing.

The curse wasn’t an old prophecy made by Ruth. The phrase was popularised much later as a way of explaining a remarkable championship drought. The National Baseball Hall of Fame credits Boston writer Dan Shaughnessy with helping popularise the Curse of the Bambino story.

Then Boston won the 2004 World Series and the curse was declared broken. Eighty-six years of supernatural suffering apparently ended because the team finally won four games.

Benfica has the curse of Béla Guttmann

European football has an equally persistent curse story attached to Portuguese club Benfica.

Béla Guttmann coached Benfica to consecutive European Cup victories in 1961 and 1962. After leaving the club, he was later said to have declared that Benfica wouldn’t win another European title for one hundred years.

Benfica then lost European final after European final, which gave the supposed curse exactly the sort of evidence a sports legend needs. UEFA has discussed the Guttmann curse and its hold over Benfica’s European-final history.

Whether Guttmann ever delivered the famous wording exactly as it is now repeated has been questioned. That hardly matters to a curse once it has a losing streak to feed on. Every new defeat becomes another chapter.

Why does winning make a superstition stronger?

This is probably the easiest part to understand. If you try something and lose, you stop bothering with it. If you try something and win, it gets another chance.

Steve Waugh used a red cloth and scored a century, so the cloth stayed. Neil McKenzie’s bat ended up on the ceiling and he scored a hundred, so somehow sticking cricket equipment overhead became worth repeating. A coin went under Olympic ice and Canada won two hockey gold medals, so the loonie became lucky.

Every success gives the ritual another piece of evidence. Failures are easier to explain away. Perhaps you didn’t do it quite right. Perhaps somebody else broke the luck, or maybe the ritual worked and the result would have been even worse without it.

That’s why sports superstition can become almost impossible to disprove from inside the belief. A win proves the lucky shirt works and a loss proves you need to try harder next time.

Can a lucky ritual actually help an athlete?

It can help without being lucky in the supernatural sense.

Research into superstition has found that activating a lucky belief can sometimes improve confidence, persistence or performance on certain tasks. That doesn’t mean luck has changed. The person feels more confident and behaves differently because they believe they have something on their side.

The APA’s discussion of athletic superstition makes the same distinction. A ritual can calm a player and help them feel prepared. Problems begin when the ritual starts controlling the athlete, particularly if forgetting an object or missing one step creates enough anxiety to interfere with the performance itself.

That’s also why it can be difficult to tell where preparation ends and superstition begins. If putting your left shoe on first helps you settle down, there’s not much harm in it. If losing that shoe convinces you the game is already ruined, the ritual has started doing the opposite of what you needed it to do.

You don’t have to believe you control the game to avoid jinxing it

Sports superstitions are especially good at surviving among people who insist they aren’t superstitious.

You know your shirt can’t score and you know the television can’t hear you. You also know moving to another chair won’t change a penalty shot happening in another country. You also know there are only ten minutes left and your team is winning, so why would you move now?

That little bit of doubt is enough. It’s the same reason someone can laugh while knocking on wood or tell you they don’t believe in luck while keeping their fingers crossed. When the result matters and you can no longer do anything to influence it, sitting perfectly still in your lucky shirt can feel like a contribution.

And if your team wins, you already know what you’re wearing next game.

Find more lucky habits, warnings and things people do just in case in Superstitions and Omens.