{"id":15149,"date":"2026-06-17T15:41:33","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T15:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/?p=15149"},"modified":"2026-06-17T15:41:33","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T15:41:33","slug":"the-science-behind-emotional-release-and-messis-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/?p=15149","title":{"rendered":"The Science Behind Emotional Release and Messi\u2019s Tears"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"justify-start\">\n<nav class=\"align-left col-span-full mb-base\" data-pom-e2e-test-id=\"breadcrumbs\"\/>\n<p>After watching the soccer icon tear up following a historic goal, we try to understand the science of why human beings wait until the moment of triumph to let it all out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/p>\n<p class=\"fp-leadCaption py-tight text-left font-utility text-utility3-size leading-utility3-line-height text-secondary\"> (Photo: Ulrik Pedersen\/NurPhoto via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"article-body\">\n<p>Published June 17, 2026 09:04AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Lionel Messi scored, and then he cried, and then he tried to make it look like he hadn\u2019t. He bunched the bottom of his jersey up to his eyes the way you do with stinging sweat. It was not sweat.<\/p>\n<p>It was the first goal of his fifth World Cup, in a stadium in Kansas, 20 years to the day since his first one. He\u2019d score twice more before the night was over\u2014his first World Cup hat trick, at 38 years old, which is roughly 110 in soccer years. By the final whistle he\u2019d tied Miroslav Klose\u2019s all-time World Cup record and Argentina had beaten Algeria 3\u20130. Algeria, for the record, is the same team he scored his first international goal against, 19 years ago.<\/p>\n<p>It was easy to forget, watching all this, that Messi started out as a small kid with a growth disorder\u2014the one the academies were wary of, too little and too breakable for the sport. He is one of the ultimate stories of an underdog who grinded his way to become a soccer god.<\/p>\n<p>But why did he cry? It wasn\u2019t after the hat trick, mind you. And not after they had won.<\/p>\n<p>Someone asked him about it during post-game interviews:<\/p>\n<p><i>\u201cLa verdad, totalmente ajeno a lo deportivo, pas\u00e9 unos d\u00edas dif\u00edciles, complicados. Estoy agradecido a toda la delegaci\u00f3n, a mis compa\u00f1eros. Estuvieron siempre, como siempre, al lado m\u00edo. Me dieron muchas fuerzas para que est\u00e9 bien y nada m\u00e1s.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Translation: \u201cIt was something completely unrelated to football. I went through some difficult, complicated days. I\u2019m grateful to the whole delegation, to my teammates. They were always by my side, as always. They gave me a lot of strength to be okay, and nothing more.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He kept it deliberately private, which is the correct play when the gossipy sports press would very much like to convert your complications into content.<\/p>\n<p>Still, it was a beautiful moment\u2014watching a god shed a tear.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_2744952\" class=\"pom-image-wrap photo-alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" decoding=\"async\" data-nimg=\"1\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-2744952\" style=\"color:transparent\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/MessiKick-1024x576.jpg?width=1080&amp;auto=webp&amp;quality=75&amp;fit=cover 1x, https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/MessiKick-1024x576.jpg?width=2048&amp;auto=webp&amp;quality=75&amp;fit=cover 2x\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/MessiKick-1024x576.jpg?width=2048&amp;auto=webp&amp;quality=75&amp;fit=cover\"\/><figcaption class=\"pom-caption\"><span class=\"article__caption\">Lionel Messi shoots and scores the goal to make it 1-0.<\/span> (Photo: Tom Weller\/picture alliance via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I have cried a lot in sports. Sometimes watching them, like when the Knicks won games 4 and 5. But mainly doing them in a proudly mid-way\u2014I get passed by people in inflatable costumes. And yet several marathons and halves into my running journey, I still cry at the end of every single one. A few of those tears I could account for. Mostly, I chalk it up to an amalgam of fatigue and just being a human in the modern world, complicated emotions and memories that had simply been waiting for a moment to say: <i>I\u2019m heeeere!<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Which, it turns out, is more or less the science. Not that I knew that at the time. I know it now because Messi\u2019s tears did to me what they apparently did to a few million other people, which is send me to Google. It starts innocently, why do people cry, and ends several hours and one academic PDF later.<\/p>\n<p>Where it ended, for me, was a Dutch psychologist named Ad Vingerhoets, who is about as close as the field has to a Chief Science Officer of Crying. He wrote a book called <i>Why Only Humans Weep<\/i>\u2014 which is the title and, apparently, still an open question. His through-line: tears do two jobs. They tell other people we need help, and they help us reset after a hard run of feeling.<\/p>\n<p>But the deep cut that stuck with me is older and stranger. In 1979, a Temple psychologist named Jay Efran published a paper with the all-time title<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"text-brand-primary underline hover:text-brand-primary\/85 break-words overflow-wrap-anywhere underline-offset-[3px]\" data-afl-p=\"0\" href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/BF00994161\"> \u201cWhy Grown-Ups Cry,\u201d<\/a> built partly on watching 11 people react to the film <i>The Miracle Worker<\/i>. His finding: We don\u2019t cry at the peak of distress, when we could actually use the help. We cry on the way down\u2014during what he called the recovery phase, once the tension breaks and the body says it\u2019s safe to let go. You white-knuckle the crisis, then hand in your resignation the second it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n<p>A finish line, literally or metaphorically, can be that too. You spend 26 miles, or 90 minutes, or 19 years, holding something at bay. Then you stop. And the thing you were holding back does not care that the world is watching.<\/p>\n<p>Which might be why Messi\u2019s tears came when they did\u2014not at the hat trick, but at the first goal. The second the ball crossed the line, so did he.<\/p>\n<p>The deeper I went, though, the less anyone seemed to agree on whether crying does anything at all. Some studies find catharsis; others find people just feel worse afterward; one found it did nothing measurable to stress, beyond helping people steady their breathing. The tidy \u201ca good cry flushes it all out\u201d saying is more folklore. Which I found kind of comforting, staring into my screen at 2 A.M. We\u2019ve been weeping for 3,500 years and still can\u2019t explain it, yet we do it anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Messi cried and then said almost nothing about why\u2014the move of a man who\u2019s been famous since he was 12. I cried and then wrote 800 words about it\u2014the move of a man who has a column. We handle it differently. But I\u2019d put money on us crying about the same thing, which is to say: not the sport. It\u2019s never really the sport.<\/p>\n<p><!-- --><span hidden=\"\" aria-hidden=\"true\"\/><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/culture\/essays-culture\/science-of-crying-lionel-messi\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After watching the soccer icon tear up following a historic goal, we try to understand the science of why human beings wait until the moment of triumph to let it all out. (Photo: Ulrik Pedersen\/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Published June 17, 2026 09:04AM Lionel Messi scored, and then he cried, and then he tried to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wild-living"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildgreenquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}