What Kolkata’s Messi Event Teaches Us About Crowd Behaviour |
For days, Kolkata had been gearing up for one of the most anticipated sporting moments of the year: Lionel Messi’s appearance during the G.O.A.T India Tour 2025. Fans arrived hours early, clutching flags, jerseys and hopes of witnessing a rare moment up close. But the excitement, the build-up, and the emotional investment took an unexpected turn when Messi left the stadium within minutes.
The mood shifted almost instantly. The same energy that fuelled cheers now fuelled frustration. Some fans vandalised seats; others rushed onto the pitch. While there was no crowd crush or stampede, the emotional swing itself left people shocked — how did a celebration tip so quickly into chaos?
To understand this, we need to understand how human emotions behave in large gatherings, especially when expectations collide with reality.
Think of the feeling when you stand in a long queue to buy food at a concert, only to be told the stall has run out just as your turn arrives. It’s not rage — it’s disappointment mixed with a sense of unfairness.
Now magnify that feeling across 60,000 people.
Crowds come in with a shared emotional investment:
“We waited together, we paid together, we believed together.”
When that expectation collapses in an instant — a cancelled act, a celebrity leaving early, a show ending abruptly — the emotional letdown doesn’t stay personal. It spreads. Research calls this collective frustration.
This doesn’t excuse the damage done — but it explains why the emotional temperature changes so sharply when a shared dream suddenly feels undone.
In any large gathering, people don’t just watch the event; they also watch the people running it. Psychologists call this situational norming: we take behavioural cues from the environment to understand what is acceptable.
According to social psychologist Prof. John Drury, who studies crowd behaviour at the University of Sussex, crowds are not inherently chaotic; they become chaotic when the signals that normally guide behaviour weaken. People look for structure — and when they don’t find it, ambiguity fills the space.
Inside a stadium, structure usually comes........