At some point, sports fans are guaranteed to go home heartbroken. But no matter how familiar that sting of disappointment might be, for some die-hard fans, it never gets easier. “When you’re highly identified with your team, you truly feel it’s an extension of who you are,” says Daniel Wann, a social psychologist at Murray State University in Kentucky who has studied sports fandom for decades (and roots for the Kansas City Chiefs and, out of obligation to his wife, the Ohio State Buckeyes). “You feel the team’s victories and successes as your own.”

So when the final whistle blows on a loss, it doesn’t register as something that happened to a group of athletes far away. It lands like a personal defeat—which is why the well-meaning things people say so often miss.

We asked researchers who study sports fandom what to say—and not say—when someone’s team loses.

The best thing to say when someone’s team loses: ‘Let’s zoom out’

When a friend is gutted over a team’s loss, your instinct might be to fix the feeling fast. But the best approach isn’t to talk them out of their disappointment and instead to widen the frame around it. You might word it like this: “Zoom out a little bit, and realize how great the season was,” suggests Edward Hirt, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, who studies the science behind fandom. “We fixate so much on the present, that last game.” Pull back, and the loss stops being the whole story and becomes just one chapter.

After a tough loss—especially a close one—fans tend to tunnel in on the single moment it all went wrong: the missed free throw, the blown call, the shot that never should have left someone’s hands. Psychologists call this counterfactual thinking, and it’s the engine behind that maddening “if only” spiral. Zooming out interrupts the tunnel. Instead of fixating on the one play that lost the game, you widen the aperture to take in everything that went right on the way there. As Wann puts it, you don’t want to “judge a season or tournament based on the outcome of the last event.” Think of a team that loses the first game of the Final Four, he says: “You’ve got to have a lot of wins along the way. You had a lot of smiles along the way to get to this stage.”

The key is to be specific. A breezy “good season!” won’t land—it sounds like a consolation prize (or, at worst, sarcastic). Name the actual highlights: the young player who broke out, the chemistry this particular team had, the fact that nobody expected them to get this far in the first place. “There are so many positives to be able to get to where you got,” Hirt says. The more concrete you are, the harder it is for the fan to wave it off—and the easier it is for them to start seeing the glass as half full.

One caveat, and it’s a big one: timing. Don’t zoom out three minutes after the final whistle. In the immediate aftermath, a fan doesn’t need perspective—they sometimes need space, “both psychological and physical,” Wann says. Lead with empathy, let the rawness pass, and only then widen the lens. Reframe too soon, and even the best advice reads as rushing someone past feelings they’re not done processing.

Other comforting things to say after a tough loss

“Let’s zoom out” may be the strongest play in the playbook, but it’s not the only one. A few other responses can help, too.

Start with the simplest one, because it’s also the most foolproof: “That was a really tough loss. I’m sorry.” No spin, no silver lining, just plain acknowledgment that losing hurts. It works even better with a little credibility behind it. “If the person knows that the individual speaking doesn’t know anything about sports,” the sympathy can “ring a little bit hollow,” Wann says. But tell a heartbroken fan, “‘Hey, I’m a Cleveland Browns fan—boy, do I get it,’” and suddenly you’ve got what Wann calls “fandom street cred.” Misery loves company, especially the kind that understands what you're going through.

Next, gently remind them there was always more to the journey than the final score. This is particularly true if they attended games in person or threw big watch parties with friends. Nobody travels to matches, paints their face, or organizes a game-day event purely for the final score of a single game. The camaraderie, friendships, and rituals around fandom still endure.

Then there’s a classic: “There’s always next year.” Handle this one with care, Wann cautions. If you say it to a fan whose team is young and on the rise, it can be genuinely consoling. But to someone whose national team just got bounced from the World Cup, which won’t return for four years? It can come off as mocking. Read the room—and the calendar—before deploying it.

What not to say to someone whose team lost

Now for the landmines. Never tell a grieving fan “it’s just a game,” Wann warns. It may be a reflexive platitude, but it’s also one of the worst things you can say, because to a devoted fan it just isn’t true. “It’s almost an insult,” Wann says. “It’s basically telling them that this thing that they care so much about is stupid.” Dismissing it, he says, is like telling someone “it’s just your job, or it’s just your family.” For many fans, a team represents something bigger than the final score.

A close cousin is “get over it” and its smug little sibling, “Why do you care so much?” Hirt calls this one of the hardest things a fan can hear, because it dismisses their feelings. It’s the same reason you’d never say it to someone going through a breakup. “You have to deal with those feelings,” he says. Rushing a fan past grief works about as well as rushing anyone past any type of grief—which is to say, not at all.

If your own team won while theirs lost, resist the urge to gloat. A little playful ribbing may be fair game among rivals, but piling on rarely helps in the immediate aftermath. After all, as Wann puts it, “the emotions are absolutely real”—and something you’ll inevitably experience as a sports fan, too.

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