India won the T20 World Cup on Sunday. And a strange thing happened across social media: people started asking why it didn’t feel like it used to. The answer has almost nothing to do with cricket.
Two tweets appeared within minutes of each other after India lifted 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 World Cup frequency. Biennial isn’t that special any more.”
Both observations are correct. But they are symptoms of a much larger shift – one that cuts through economics, psychology, post-colonial theory, and the strange inner life of a nation that is no longer sure it needs sport to tell it who it is.
THE TREADMILL THAT GOES NOWHERE
The first explanation is the most intuitive, and it comes from behavioural economics. In 1971, psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell published a paper titled Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society, introducing what is now widely known as the hedonic treadmill. The central finding was simple: humans adapt to positive experiences. The joy produced by any given event diminishes with repetition, regardless of the event’s objective quality. What felt extraordinary the first time feels ordinary by the fifth.
India has won four ICC titles in the last five years. Research on the physiology of sports fandom has confirmed that watching your team win triggers dopamine release comparable to personal achievement. Yet hedonic adaptation theory predicts that this emotional uplift diminishes as the outcome becomes routine. The spike requires unexpectedness. When India wins regularly, victory becomes the baseline. And you cannot 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 genuine neurological arousal, activating the same pathways associated with personal success. The hedonic treadmill framework explains why that response weakens over time. It is not because the brain stops registering the win, but because adaptation gradually narrows the gap between expectation and outcome.
The Twitter user who pointed to frequency was therefore partly right. The problem is not simply that the World Cup comes around every two years. It is that India no longer loses often enough for the wins to feel exceptional.
SPORT AS A PROXY FOR NATIONAL ANXIETY
Hedonic adaptation explains the personal response. The more interesting question is collective. Why did 1983 feel the way it did? Why did a billion people hold their breath in 2011 in a way they simply did not last night?
A large body of sports economics research has established that a country’s success in elite sport is closely tied 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 sport infrastructure, coaching, and athlete development. The richer the country, the better equipped it is to win.
But John Manuel Luiz and Riyas Fadal (2011), studying African nations’ performance at the Beijing Olympics, made a more nuanced point. For developing nations, 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 effectively a luxury good. Its demand increases with development. In other words, even when a country is poor, it finds ways to invest in the one arena where it can stand equal to the world.
India in 1983 was still a low-income, controlled economy, far less confident of 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 the boundary and a nation that had not expected 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 THING AND THE PLEASURE OF LOSS
A 2024 paper published in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies goes further. Its author, Anuranj, uses the philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s concept of the “national thing” to analyse Indian cricket. Zizek argues that collective enjoyment in nationalist sport is not simply about pride. It functions around the idea of loss. As the paper explains, the concept “postulates that the recourse to nationalism can cause a pleasure-in-pain situation and evoke extreme ‘enjoyment’ (jouissance), which functions on the idea of a sudden sense of loss.” The emotional charge is highest when the stakes feel existential.
This explains something that pure economics cannot: why the India-Pakistan match still feels different. That fixture carries the weight of Partition, three wars, and seventy-five years of unresolved history. Losing to Pakistan is not just losing a cricket match. It becomes a referendum on something larger. On whether history has been kind to us. On whether our choices as a nation were vindicated. The existential stakes remain intact. And so the emotional charge remains intact.
India versus Australia in a T20 final carries none of that historical burden. It is, increasingly, simply sport. And sport, when it is just sport, produces a different and quieter form of joy.
CRICKET AS AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY AND WHAT REPLACED IT
Sociologist Pamela Devan, writing in Sport in Society (2012), argued that cricket’s hold on Indian identity was built precisely on the absence of other unifying forces. India is too vast, too linguistically fragmented, and too internally diverse for a single cultural identity to bind it together easily. Cricket stepped into that vacuum. As Devan put it, the sport created an “imagined community”, a space where a Tamilian, a Punjabi and a Kashmiri could temporarily share the same emotional experience and call it national.
That function has not disappeared. But it now has company.
India has Bollywood films winning at Cannes. A space programme that landed on the Moon’s south pole before anyone else. A diaspora that runs Fortune 500 companies and shapes American policy. A seat at the G20 table that the country not only occupies but leads. The country’s self-image is now being constructed from multiple directions simultaneously. Cricket is no longer the sole load-bearing pillar.
Devan’s argument was written before Chandrayaan-3, before India’s G20 presidency, and before the global moment that Indian soft power has been experiencing. Yet it anticipated the logic clearly. Once cricket is no longer the only arena in which India can stand equal to the world, it stops carrying that singular emotional weight. The imagined community it creates becomes one community among many rather than the only one that matters.
WHAT THE IPL DID TO THE SACRED
There is one more variable, and it is the most visible: the Indian Premier League. Souvik Naha (2015), in a historical study of cricket’s convergence with India’s entertainment and glamour industries across a century from 1913 to 2013, documented how cricket and entertainment had become “inextricably connected deeper and wider than is acknowledged by commentators”. Each borrowed the other’s brand value and consumption logic. The IPL is the fullest expression of that convergence. It is a product engineered for entertainment consumption, with franchises, auctions, cheerleaders, and a broadcast calendar designed to maximise viewership throughout the year.
Before the IPL, the cricket calendar had natural scarcity. A World Cup was a festival. It was rare, ceremonial, and shared. Families gathered. Streets emptied. The match was an event in the original sense of the word, something that interrupted the ordinary. That interruption gave it weight.
Now cricket is a stream. There is always a match, a franchise, a transfer window, or an auction. Cricket is available the way ambient noise is available, constantly present and therefore largely unfelt. The IPL also did something subtler. It redistributed emotional loyalty. When you have spent four months caring about your franchise, pouring tribal energy into the Mumbai Indians or the Chennai Super Kings, the national team becomes one team among many.
Daniel Wann’s foundational research on team identification (2006) established 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 dividing that investment.
WHAT ARRIVAL ACTUALLY FEELS LIKE
Put all of this together and a picture emerges that is more hopeful than it first appears.
The intensity with which a country celebrates a sporting victory is inversely proportional to how secure it feels in the world. Germany’s fans do not weep the way Argentine fans do. 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 the telling exception. It is a country still processing imperial decline, still uncertain about 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 that same curve. Not all the way to the end. The Pakistan match still proves that. But it is moving.
The Anuranj paper makes this point precisely. The “national Thing” in Indian cricket still activates most powerfully when the fixture carries existential stakes. For everything else, the jouissance has dimmed. Not because Indians care less about cricket, but because the sport is no longer carrying the entire burden of national self-worth.
The calm after a T20 win, the shrug and the smile, the quick rush of dopamine and then back to the evening, is not apathy. It is not ingratitude. It is not a generation that cares less about cricket.
It is what it feels like to be a country that no longer needs validation.
The generations who wept in 1983 wept because they were hungry. Because the country was anxious about its place in the world. Because a cricket match was the only arena where India could defeat anyone at anything on a global stage, and winning there meant something that had little to do with cricket.
You do not need that anymore. India does not need that anymore. And most countries, most peoples across history, never reach the point where they can say that.
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