Bengal has two poets whose vintage is considered above all others: Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam. Now, with full awareness of the absurdity involved, one may have to add a third name to the footnotes: MD Ahnaf Hossain.Hossain, a Bangladeshi-origin New Yorker, became a social media sensation after his chant: “My mayor’s Muslim, my bagel’s Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four.” Now that’s no Gitanjali or Bidrohi, but it certainly united New Yorkers and, by extension, all members of the global order who feel they already live in New York because they have memorised every Friends and How I Met Your Mother episode.Except it didn’t quite become Knicks in four, with superstitious sports fans blaming Donald Trump’s attendance at Madison Square Garden for Game 3, so the chant had to be updated: “My mayor’s still Muslim, my bagel’s still Jewish. The Pope is on our side, Knicks in five.”Now, while that might seem like poetic licence, the first American pope was seen giving a thumbs up when a fan screamed: “Pope Leo, go Knicks.” The pope, who shares an alma mater with three members of the current Knicks line-up, also signed a jersey for Knicks superfan Spike Lee which had “Pope Leo” written on the back, which led some to wonder if the Knicks had a divine assist, more so since Game 4 of the Finals featured a miraculous 29-point comeback.But now talk has turned to another sort of sporting superstition: the Mamdani Effect. While the Mamdani Effect might sound like a boost for progressive causes since the election of New York’s first Muslim mayor, it’s actually what The Athletic called a Zohran Mamdani sports summer, after two of his teams, Arsenal and Knicks, ended historic trophy droughts.Arsenal had last won the league in 2004, the Knicks had last won the NBA in 1973, and even this joke correlation was too much for Fox News, which wrote: “You would think, then, that credit for these teams’ accomplishments would go to the players, coaches, front and office staff. But that would imply a level of awareness and rationality that many within left-wing sports media organizations simply do not possess.”While one can see why Fox would be miffed, particularly since the only game the Knicks lost was when Donald Trump was in attendance, and it’s the octogenarian’s greatest chagrin that the city he grew up in never accepted him, the Mamdani Effect has become a buzzword for sports fans. In strict, non-scientific terms, it is the belief that a socialist mayor of New York, by merely supporting a team, can reverse decades of sporting misery. This is obviously nonsense, which is precisely why sports fans will believe it.The young mayor has certainly leaned into it, turning up for Eid wearing a full Arsenal-themed kurta and telling people who came to him chanting that he was Muslim that “it was true”.Now sports fans have always believed in some bizarre superstitions over the years, including yours truly.Cricket fans are known to become completely catatonic when Sachin Tendulkar or Virat Kohli are batting, risking bladder infection rather than running to the toilet. In the World Cup, the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken along a superfan who they believe has the superpower of stopping goals through his gesture of standing motionless like a human statue for 90 minutes with his arm raised as a tribute to Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.Meanwhile, some believe Italy’s inability to reach the World Cup yet again is a sign of the “Sarajevo Curse”, a reference to a rather dark moment in the nation’s history where Italian tourists allegedly signed up for “sniper safaris” to shoot innocent people during the war in the 1990s. Incidentally, in 2026, Italy lost on penalties to Bosnia and Herzegovina.There’s also the Nike World Cup curse, where a popular ad featuring the top stars of the time saw many of them flop. Didier Drogba broke his arm, Wayne Rooney’s England flopped, Ronaldinho didn’t even make the tournament and Fabio Cannavaro’s defending world champions Italy were knocked out in the group stage. Across the Atlantic, the Madden curse became America’s great video-game theology: put an NFL star on the cover and wait for his season to go kaput.But all of this brings us back to the Mamdani summer, and it will really be the icing on the cake if his team ends up winning. No, not the USA, whom he has going out in the quarter-finals to England. He has backed Morocco to win the World Cup by beating France in the final. If that actually does happen, and Africa gets its first World Cup winner, then even the most scientific minds will find it hard to argue against the Mamdani Effect.
