Arguably, football doesn’t need anything extra to fuel its collective sense of self-importance, but the idea that it can create new life certainly will.
You may remember a rather dramatic match in the National League towards the end of last season when Wrexham and Notts County met in what was effectively a winner-takes-promotion clash. In the 97th minute, Wrexham goalkeeper Ben Foster saved a penalty to seal a 3-2 victory, giving them three points clear with a game in hand over their rivals.
According to Foster, the result of the collective ecstasy of that moment became clear nine months later: he recently recorded a video in which he claimed that the birth rate at Wrexham Maelor Hospital increased by 24 per cent in January 2024 compared to a year earlier .
That clip was tweeted by Wrexham co-owner Ryan Reynolds, a father of four, adding the comment: “Normally this happens when you pull the goalkeeper, not the other way around. Trust me.”
Normally this happens when you pull the goalie and not the other way around. Trust me. pic.twitter.com/fIT0SoVFTY
-Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) February 14, 2024
This is an exciting theory that comes up from time to time: the idea that there is a definite correlation between a team’s moments of success and a mini baby boom. Probably the most famous in football is the “Iniesta generation”: the story goes that the Barcelona midfielder’s last-minute winning goal against Chelsea in the 2009 Champions League semi-final inspired so many moments of intimacy that Nine months later, the maternity wards of Catalonia were flooded.
“There will be a lot of love made tonight,” Gerard Piqué said after that goal, and initial reports suggested that the birth rate increased by 45 percent the following January. In 2020, Iniesta made surprise video calls to a pair of children supposedly resulting from the celebrations, asking one of them if his mother had shown him the video of the goal. Which is a little strange: would you like to be saddled with the knowledge of what your parents thought at your conception?
There are many other similar reports. The Boston Red Sox’s victory in the 2004 World Series, their first in 86 years, apparently resulted in a mini baby boom. There were similar stories in New Zealand after the 2011 Rugby World Cup. There is also a long-standing theory that birth rates would increase in the cities of the teams that won the Super Bowl, encouraged by a commercial produced by the NFL in 2016. which cited nothing less than “data” to prove the theory. .
But is any of this true? Do sporting successes also function as aphrodisiacs and subsequently generate many additions to the population?
The short answer to the question is… no. Or at least…probably not.
Let’s start with the Foster-Wrexham example: For starters, it’s a little difficult to establish the accuracy of the figure Foster cites. He is attributed to the Maelor Hospital, but The Athletic He contacted the NHS health board that runs that hospital, which reported nothing out of the ordinary about birth rates in January, compared to recent months or even the same point a year earlier. That health board (which covers other hospitals besides Maelor) said its region-wide birth rates in January 2024 had increased compared to the previous year, but only by 1.5 percent.
Foster’s representatives were unable to help, nor was Wrexham. Potentially more rats are being smelled because of the origin of Foster’s video: it was part of a Valentine’s Day promotion with one of her sponsors, pushing a line of products related to baby announcements. That company was also unable to clarify where the statistic came from.
But hey, an over-the-top marketing gimmick doesn’t necessarily disprove the theory. What happens with the Iniesta generation?
To begin with, that 45 percent figure is nonsense, according to the spokesperson for a hospital, the Quirón in Barcelona, that births went from nine or ten per day to 14 or 15. unnerved most statisticians.
Still, a larger, more scientific study from 2013, published in the British Medical Journal, suggested there was an increase. The study analyzed birth rates in two counties in central Catalonia, Solsones and Bages, for 60 months between 2007 and 2011.
The study said: “Our results show a transitory and significant 16 percent increase in births in February 2010, nine months after FC Barcelona’s exciting victories in May 2009, well below the 45 percent increase reported. by the media. We can infer that, at least among the target population, the heightened euphoria that follows a victory may cultivate hedonic sensations that result in intimate celebrations, of which unplanned births may be a consequence.”
Foster makes the crucial save last year (Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
If, at this stage, you need to take a moment to fan yourself after being overwhelmed with love at this bold language, then do so.
The problem is, unless we track down everyone who gave birth in those regions in February 2010 and ask if it was Iniesta’s goal that got them so excited, there’s no real way to prove a definitive link. Even the report’s authors were divided on that point, admitting that their loyalties may have influenced their conclusions.
The reports state that “some of the authors (who happen to be Barça fans) believe that an intense and brief stimulus (Barça’s wins in May 2009) was the cause of the increase in births. The rest of the authors (who, by the way, are not Barcelona fans) interpret that the term ‘Iniesta generation’ is inappropriate.” Big club bias… affects even academic researchers.
What about World Cup victories? If this theory were true, shouldn’t it inspire nationwide copulation and subsequent traffic jams in maternity wards around the world? Well maybe. A look at birth rates in Spain after winning the 2010 World Cup in South Africa suggests something could be afoot. According to statistics from the National Statistics Institute, in March 2011 (that is, nine months after Iniesta’s victory in extra time for Spain) there were 40,036 births, compared to 38,621 in January, 36,694 in February, 37,528 in April and 39,462 in May.
Iniesta 2010 #World Cup The final goal changed Spanish football forever!🇪🇸👏🏆
— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) May 8, 2018
AHA! So, a definite increase. But if we take a look at the figures from previous years, we see that in March 2009 there were 41,830 births and in March 2010, 40,462. Oh. So not so much.
Additionally, researchers from the German Institute of Labor Economics produced a study in 2021 which looked at monthly birth rates in 50 countries since 1965, and correlated them with World Cups and European Championships, and actually found that birth rates decreased nine months after those tournaments, not increased.
“According to the authors,” the report said, “one possible explanation could be that a massive increase in media and entertainment consumption, followed by extensive celebrations with friends and compatriots, comes at the expense of ‘intimate time.'”
Apparently, there has been a lot of academic research into this phenomenon. One for Fabrizio Bernardi and Marco Cozzani for the European Population Review, really dug deep into the weeds, comparing Spain’s birth data between 2001 and 2015 with betting odds, to look at the “shocks of mood that arise” from the results. They found very little correlation, but the study was worth reading if only for the subtitle “Celebratory intercourse versus sad abstention.”
The Super Bowl theory was mentioned above, but it turns out it’s probably bunk, too. Another study, conducted by academics at the University of North Carolinafound that there was basically no change in birth rates in Super Bowl-winning cities nine months after the big game.
In the few cases where there were changes, the report found that, as in the study relating to the World Cups and European Championships, they decreased, rather than increased.
All of which is no particular surprise to Josh Wilde, a fertility researcher at the University of Oxford’s Leverhulme Center for Population Sciences.
“There are never really things you can point to, huge euphoric effects,” he says when asked what kinds of things tend to cause spikes in birth rates, noting that identifiable single events (like Covid-19 or financial problems in a country) are more likely to be behind the decreases than the increases. “The biggest predictor of short-term changes in birth rates is the unemployment rate, by far.”
Wilde explains that you can always find examples of increases in birth rates, which can then be attributed to a sporting victory of some kind. But first, these tend to be selected and highlighted by people who use them to perhaps promote a product or create a catchy headline, and second, it’s basically impossible to prove whether they are related to that sports victory.
“Can they?” he says, when asked if sporting events can cause an increase in the birth rate. “Well, anything is possible. But do they do it? No.
“The other thing to consider is that accidental births do happen, but they are becoming rarer. If you have a couple who has sex once a week, and then they decide to have sex twice a week, they are not going to double the number of children they have, because they take contraceptives or organize their lives in some way. to prevent those births.
“If you’re one of those couples and you suddenly get happy because your team won, that might cause some accidental births, but not enough to be detectable at the population level.”
Wilde also points out that, in general, people do not express their joy at the fact that their team has won an important game in this way. As a general rule, people might celebrate by going out drinking or driving through the streets honking their car horns and wrapping a scarf around their head, but probably not by heading to the bedroom.
Feel free to contradict this in the comments, but you can imagine that very few fans return home with a bottle of champagne in their hand and a rose between their teeth, declaring to their beloved: “Honey: victory! Follow me up! It’s a relatively offensive notion, to say the least: You probably wouldn’t feel too good if the reason your partner wanted to be intimate was because his passions had been aroused not by you, but by a sporting event.
Wilde says: “Think about the people who don’t take contraception and would be prone to these accidental births: what fraction of them would be happy enough to win the World Cup to even be in that situation? It’s a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of people who are even in a situation where this could happen, so if you get some claim that says birth rates are increasing by 40 percent, it’s ridiculously implausible.
“Will you find some carefully selected examples online of birth rates rising nine months after sporting events? You’ll. Is that something systematic that happens in the real world? No.”
So there we have it. It is our solemn duty to inform Ben Foster that, sadly, he was almost certainly not responsible for a large number of new babies in the Wrexham area. And it seems that football (or any sport, for that matter) cannot take credit for the emergence of a new life.
Ultimately, it’s probably for the best.
(Main graphic: Getty Images, design by Dan Goldfarb)
