Underperforming Soccer Stars — Blame the Smog

Walking away from the stadium after a football match and you’ll hear all sorts of excuses for the poor performance you have just witnessed. Everything from the referee, the manager, the goalie and the fact you forget your lucky socks will be used — often in the same sentence. But a discussion paper for the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany could have handed fans another thing to blame when their team loses — air pollution.

Air pollution — a deadly, costly hidden danger

Air pollution is an invisible danger — especially in our towns where vehicle emissions dominate the air pollution figures. Cars and other vehicles emit particulate matter, nitrous oxides, and volatile organic compounds including benzene and 1,3-butadiene amongst other emissions. Although the smog filled scenes of London town are behind us in the UK — air pollution is still with us with several air quality warnings issued by in the past few years. A key tool in monitoring air pollution is chromatography — as discussed in the article, Volatile Organic Compound Determination in Health-related Research: A Review.

The effects of air pollution result in thousands of premature deaths every year. The World Health Organization estimated that in 2010, air pollution caused approximately 600,000 premature deaths in Europe — with the economic cost of the death and disease caused by air pollution put at US$ 1.6 trillion per year, equivalent to almost one-tenth of the GDP of the whole of the EU in 2013. Truly staggering figures.

But how does this relate to football?

Ref abandoned match — too much smog!

A group of researchers from the Institute for the Study of Labor have investigated how air pollution affects an individual’s productivity — and they focused on football because of the accessible data available. It is known that long-term air pollution contributes to illness — but how does short-term exposure affect our output as workers?

The team examined data from a 12-year period, looking at almost 3000 matches in the Bundesliga —the top division in Germany — between 1999 and 2011. They measured a player’s productivity by looking at the amount of passes the player made in a match — and compared that to the air quality data at the stadium when the match kicked off.

After analysing the data from almost 1800 players on 29 teams the team claim that their results show that air pollution — measured by particulate matter — has a negative effect on productivity, although by only a small amount. They also found that air quality had a greater impact on older players and on players whose roles required more effort — for example, midfielders.

The work can also be looked at in the wider context of society as a whole, as it shows that the economic impact of air pollution might not necessarily be limited to the impact on our health.

So, before you buy expensive tickets to the big match — check the air quality levels.

Image from pixabay