Sitting in your seat in the stadium, you look to your right and see it approaching, rising in crescendo.
A wave is coming.
When it reaches you, you jump and throw your arms up, making whatever noise you deem appropriate.
You sit back and he continues – living his own life.
It is a tradition that is repeated in stadiums of all sports throughout the world.
The largest so far, according to the Guinness Book of Records, was recorded at the Nascar race in the American Bristol in 2008.
There, a wave of 157,574 people swept through the stadium, but it didn’t last as long as some others.
What is considered the longest continuous wave lasted 17 minutes and took place in 2015 at a stadium in Japan during a concert.
As part of the countdown to the start of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Mexico City decided to break the Guinness World Record for the longest human wave in the world.
The chosen location is an ideal urban setting for the spread of a visible, uninterrupted wave: the distinctive Paseo de la Reforma is a legendary historical, financial and cultural corridor inspired by European boulevards.
And the city itself corresponds to this undertaking.
It’s right there, specifically at the Aztec Stadium (Estadio Azteca), this unique form of collective expression first attracted the world’s attention 40 years ago.
Since then, the phenomenon has become closely associated with Mexico.
In many countries it is known as the ‘Mexican Wave’, although it was popularized there in the world in 1986, and is believed to have been first performed in the USA.
From Mexico to the world
Many believe that George Henderson or ‘Mad George’ of the USA is credited with starting and managing the first wave.
He believes it happened on October 15, 1981, at a baseball game between the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees, in California.
“The Oakland Athletics had already lost two road games,” he recalled.
“In the third inning, I thought I’d try something that nobody had seen before.”
“I found three sections of the stadium and started explaining what I wanted.”
The first two attempts failed, but from the third time the wave went around the entire stadium.
And in the fourth, he managed to create one whole, uninterrupted wave.
“The whole stadium went crazy,” says Henderson.
Because the game was televised, this fun way to cheer on the team became popular, and fans of other sports took it over.
It even appeared at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, but it wasn’t until the 1986 World Cup in Mexico that it was introduced to a huge world audience and thus became a global phenomenon.
An unusual project
Fifteen years later, the phenomenon tickled the curiosity of scientists from the statistical and biological-physical group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.
“The reason we got interested in stadium waves is that people often behave like particles,” physicist Iles Farkas told the NPR network.
Together with two colleagues, Tamas Viček and Dirk Helbing, he decided to determine the rules that produce waves.
As physicists, they knew that particles following a few simple rules could create apparently complex phenomena.
It was a “somewhat offbeat summer project” but “later it became something very serious,” he added.
For their research, published in the journal Priroda (Nature) in 2002, a team analyzed videos of waves in football stadiums with more than 50,000 spectators and were surprised by what they found.
They found that a typical human wave travels clockwise and travels at about 12 meters or 20 seats per second.
With an incredibly stable profile, the wave is usually between six and 12 meters wide, which equates to about 15 seats, as it moves through the crowd.
Perhaps the most fascinating discovery is critical mass.
In large stadiums, it only takes 25 to 35 people to stand up at the same time to start a wave.
In other words, a handful of determined enthusiasts can move tens of thousands of people.
The mathematical model they built to explain this behavior is not new; they have been used to explain the propagation of an electrical signal through heart tissue or the spread of a forest fire.
The difference is that, instead of cells or trees, the “combustible material” is people.
The physicists concluded something that any fan could have told them: the wave was more likely to occur when nothing special was happening on the field.
Which brings us to a strange paradox.
A symbol of passion or an indicator of boredom?
The wave is widely regarded as a symbol of collective euphoria, an expression of togetherness and shared joy.
“When we wave, we express that we are not alone,” explains Erik Salazar Flores, an academic from the Faculty of Psychology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
In that sense, it is a physical and visible confirmation of ourselves.
And yet there is a contradiction in the explanations given for the existence of waves.
Although it can be a sign of encouragement, the inclusion of waves also represents a loss of interest among viewers and thus a certain form of alienation.
It can be both a request for action from the player and a way to get something out of the game, said Chris Hunt, the author A story from the World Cup, for the BBC.
“When the game drags on and nothing much happens on the field, the fans think it’s a way to get the most out of the money they paid for the tickets,” he explained.
If the score is tied in the final minutes of the World Cup final, there will be no waves.
If it’s a friendly game where the home team is leading, then there probably will be.
Not always, of course.
Experts point out that it also occurs in moments of euphoria before the start of the game, during the warm-up or when the result has already been decided and the celebration takes on a life of its own compared to what is happening on the field.
But it is striking that the world’s most famous stadium “spontaneous phenomenon” can happen precisely when the action on the field fails to hold the attention of the crowd.
Psychology offers an explanation for this: when collective attention does not have a clear target, the group actively works to create its own stimulus.
In those cases, the wave is not the expression of delight, but the thing that produces it.
Still riding high?
Forty years after capturing the world’s attention in Mexico, the wave continues to ride stadiums on five continents.
But his reputation has become more complex.
Some observers say that after his initial success in the 1980s, he gradually began to lose popularity and appeared more sporadically at sporting events.
In some sports, especially baseball games in the US, the wave has become the subject of heated debate.
For example, in 2014, at the National Stadium in Washington, D.C., a campaign to ban waves took off, with T-shirts bearing the slogan #killthewave (kill the wave).
Activists described it as “disrespectful”, “insulting” and “distracting”.
The National Football League’s Green Bay Packers found themselves at the center of controversy in 2019 when coach Matt Lafleur publicly asked fans to refrain from making waves when his team has the ball.
Quarterback Aaron Rodgers backed him up, suggesting that fans “better choose their moments.”
The key question for the spectators is: did you come to the stadium for the game or to be part of the spectacle?
For four decades, the answer seemed to be yes to both, sometimes simultaneously.
Those who participate say the wave has the power to create a joyous, collective moment without the need for any instruction manual.
It’s enough to just be present and allow yourself to let go of the feeling.
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