Science in thrall to football

Economists, medics and inventors go mad for the world's favourite game.

Michael Hopkin

Football fever has gripped the globe, and nobody is immune, including scientists. In the weeks running up to the world's biggest football festival, news@nature.com has been deluged with press releases and story ideas, all aiming to show that scientists love the beautiful game too. We had our say last week in our World Cup special ; here's the best of the rest.

Money and the World Cup go hand in hand, so it's perhaps no surprise that the performance of a country's football team influences that of its stock market. Writing in the Journal of Finance¹, Oyvind Norli of the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo and his colleagues show that defeat for a nation's football side causes a strong, rapid slump on its stock exchange as disgruntled traders lose their appetite for a deal.

Strangely, however, the opposite is not true: whereas shares on the 39 markets studied slumped by an average of 0.38% immediately after a defeat, there was no corresponding rise in response to a victory. Perhaps the traders were too busy celebrating...

Watch out for celebrating Turks

Meanwhile, it seems that celebrating is a tricky business, if the experience of a group of Turkish footballers are anything to go by. Orthopaedic experts examined the causes of around 150 injuries to professional players admitted to clinics over the course of two seasons, and found that nine of the injuries were sustained while celebrating goals.

Football has a tradition for exuberant goal celebrations, but the victims here might consider taking things a little easier next time they score. Five of the injuries were caused by sliding in triumph along the turf, while three were the perhaps predictable result of an entire team of players jumping on top of a prone player. And spare some pity for the remaining casualty, who was body-checked by a team mate while racing jubilantly away from the goal.

As Bülent Zeren and Haluk Öztekin, both clinicians based in Izmir, report in the American Journal of Sports Medicine², the results included ankle and rib fractures, muscle and ligament sprains, and even spinal contusions. Turkey's national side has failed to qualify for the World Cup this time around, which may come as a relief to the nation's doctors.

Beating the bookies

Fans of teams that have made it to Germany should check out the Norwegian Computing Center's World Cup website , which provides daily updates on each team's percentage likelihood of walking away with the ultimate prize in football.

The list is compiled by simulating each match many times on a computer, taking into account details of each team's quality as judged by Norway's finest football pundits, and allowing for effects of random chance in the match. The program, having played some 2,000 virtual versions of the tournament, unsurprisingly makes Brazil the favourites, with a 16.5% chance of glory. With Norway also having failed to make the grade for this tournament, its mathematicians can hopefully be relied on to produce a dispassionate analysis.

A buddy to defend you

And finally, good news for youngsters hoping for future World Cup stardom. Inventors working with researchers at the University of Warwick, UK, have unveiled the Soccer Buddy, which comes in a range of heights from 1 metre to 1.6 metres-tall to help aspiring David Beckhams to practice shooting at goal with a defender in the way. The device comes equipped with a radar tracking system for instant feedback on the speed and power of the shot. Just be careful not to over-celebrate when things go right.