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Apparently, athletes wearing red are more likely to succeed. It’s all psychological.

Experts believe that red could make individuals and teams feel more confident as well as being perceived by others as more aggressive and dominant.

No kidding. Could that be because red is an ass-kicking colour? The colour of blood, and flame and sports cars purchased by near-impotent middle-aged men the world over?

Obviously, we here at DirtyGames, and at other sites written by Red Wing-friendly bloggers, believe this wholeheartedly. Red is bad ass. It intimidates. Teams wearing red are awesome and destined for success and glory.

But even the best uniform colour in the world cannot cover for tremendous suckage.

A good team wearing red can gain the upper hand and perhaps the other team is a little less likely to mount a challenge. Or they can throw their weight around and perhaps cow their opponent into submission. Or maybe they’re just so awesomely RED that the other team doesn’t even bother playing the damn game.

But what happens when a red team plays a red team? Does whichever team forced to wear the dreaded home whites lose? Of course not.

As much as I’d love to believe that choosing the jersey colours all those decades ago gave my favourite hockey squad a built-in advantage … c’mon. It’s subjective psychological bullshit.

From this study, I can conclude that red does indeed intimidate … judging officials. Which is the way the research for this study was done:

The study, by German sports psychologists at the University of Munster, was reported in New Scientist magazine. They showed video clips of taekwondo bouts to 42 experienced referees. One combatant wore blue, the other red.

They then showed them the same clips but digitally manipulated the clothing to swap the colours. The fighters wearing red were given an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were blue.

So yes, if the sport in question were one in which subjective judgement is used to determine a large percentage of the outcome, then I could believe that red offers a significant advantage. It’s not hard to imagine that sort of bias would make itself evident in this kind of study.

And I could even believe that a slight amount of that bias would translate to sports where the play is one-on-one, and the conflict is between two individuals in close proximity. In those cases, the psychology of red might gain a few more points on the intimidation scale.

Like, perhaps, in the case of this dude:

But when you move on to large teams, with a couple of dozen millionaires working together against the enemy, any kind of advantage offered by a colour is minuscule at best and — I would argue — nonexistent.

Not that I’d be disappointed to be in the wrong. I know that, personally, I would always buy the red Wings jersey over the white one. But that’s also because I enjoy wearing a hockey jersey in the few social situations in which it is acceptable. And most of those situations involve chicken wings, pizza and beer … and jerseys are too expensive to risk visible stain.