Feel the Copa América final: Immediate and medium-term effects of major sport events and national football team identification on different components of subjective well-being Wenceslao Unanue 1 & Xavier Oriol 2 & Marcos Gómez 1 & Diego Cortez 3 & Diego Bravo 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Major sport events have important effects on fans´ well-being. Chile won its very first international football contest – the Copa América tournament – in July 2015, playing against Argentina. Thus, we explored the impact of the Chilean victory on Chileans’ subjective well-being (SWB), using a natural intervention setting. We extended the previous literature in three ways. First, we used more comprehensive measures than previous research. We collected measures of global SWB, evaluated SWB and experienced SWB. We also measured national identification with the Chilean team. Second, previous research has been con- ducted only in the Western world, whereas we studied a South American context. Third, and finally, we followed the same participants before and after the final. Most longitudinal research in the field has used cohort designs, but no panel data. The results showed that (1) a victory in a major sport event, which generates so much expectation from fans, induces high emotional activation effects and changes the levels of experienced SWB. However, our results show that it is also necessary (2) to analyze separately the cognitive and emotional SWB components, and (3) to assess different time frames after the match. For example, whereas evaluated SWB showed stable patterns of increase from pre- to post- game, global SWB and experienced SWB showed different results depending on the proximity with the final of the tournament. Similar results were found regarding the effects of national identification on SWB. Key implications about the importance of major sport events for people’ s SWB are discussed. Keywords Major sport events . Football . Copa América . Subjective well-being . Emotions . Life satisfaction . National identification The Copa América (America Cup) tournament is the most important men’ s football contest within America, and the oldest international football competition between national teams in the world (CONMEBOL n.d.). Despite the impor- tance of football for Chilean people, with 49% of the popula- tion interested in this sport (GFK Adimark 2016), the Chilean national team had never won either this continent tournament or any kind of international football championship before 2015. For this reason, the first Copa América victory in July 2015 was a special moment for the Chileans. Major sport events (such as the Copa América, the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup, and the UEFA Champions League) in which national teams participate are highly significant for their countries and have important re- percussions for individual and collective behavior (Sullivan 2015). Moreover, such events are a central target for public policies due to their hypothesized benefits for health care sys- tems, as well as for the quality of life and well-being of indi- viduals (Pawlowski et al. 2014). Further, a growing body of research is exploring the unique psychological effects of ma- jor sport events on people’ s minds (Janhuba 2016; Pawlowski et al. 2014). For example, it has been argued that the emotional effervescence inherent in this type of collective ritual plays a key role in the process (Durkheim 1995) and recent research has found initial evidence for these claims (Kavetsos and Szymanski 2010; Pawlowski et al. 2014; Stieger et al. 2015). However, the way in which these high-activation col- lective experiences affect subjective well-being (SWB; Diener 1984) is not yet completely understood. Indeed, historically, the literature on major sport events and SWB has somewhat * Wenceslao Unanue wenceslao.unanue@uai.cl 1 Business School, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Diagonal Las Torres, 2700 Santiago, Chile 2 Facultad de Educación y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile 3 School of Psychology, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile Current Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00545-x