The ad, broadcast during the 2016 Super Bowl, was a hit. Backing singers explained, to the tune of a Seal song, why they were born exactly nine months after an NFL final.
Posted at 7:45 a.m.
“When our team won/
Mom and Dad looked at each other/
Things came together/
We are all babies/
It happened on the night of the Super Bowl »
Watch the ad (in English)
It just goes to show that in football, contact is not limited to the field. A brilliant concept. But, is it true? Are we really witnessing a baby-boom after major sporting victories, such as winning a Super Bowl?
To quote insecure lovers on Facebook: it’s complicated.
Yes, this has already happened. Nine months after FC Barcelona’s triumph in the Champions League in 2009, there was indeed an increase in births in the Catalan capital. American researchers noted the same phenomenon five times in Super Bowl champion cities between 2003 and 2012. But what happened after the five other NFL finals played during this period? The opposite. Births in the cities of winning clubs have fallen. Insert sound of a football deflating here…
So much for the NFL. But what about elsewhere?
Two economics professors, Luca Fumarco and Francesco Principe, cast a wider net. They checked birth rates in 50 European countries over more than half a century, and cross-referenced them with match results from major soccer tournaments. I envy their Excel spreadsheet so much that I put it on my Christmas gift list.
Their observation: the more games were followed, the fewer babies were born nine months later. Their hypothesis is that fans were so invested in these big matches that they lacked time for indoor sports.
Two other researchers, Fabrizio Bernardi and Marco Cozzani, tried a new approach. They added a variable into the equation. Sports betting odds. For what ? To find out if an unexpected outcome – a victory of the last against the first, for example – could promote procreation.
After the victories, anticipated or not, nope. The needle didn’t move. After the unexpected defeats, however, they noticed a small spasm in their data. A decline in the birth rate, nine months later. Put it down to disappointment and sadness.
Now, what about hockey in Canada? When the Habs win, do Montrealers have more babies?
There is a recent study on the subject. It dates from this year, and it was produced by two economics professors, Maryam Dilmaghani, of St. Mary’s University, and Min Hu, of the University of British Columbia. They used the Bernardi-Cozzani method by crossing three databases: the results of NHL games between 2008 and 2019, the sports betting odds for these games and the births recorded by Statistics Canada in the league’s seven Canadian markets. during this period. Their findings are fascinating.
Let’s start with the raw numbers. For the greater Montreal area, at that time there were approximately 114 births per day. Exactly 270 days after a Canadian victory, it rose to 115. In the event of a defeat, it went down to 112. But, but, but, don’t draw hasty conclusions. Several other factors must be considered. For example, premature births, or even the few cesarean sections planned on certain days of the week, such as Sundays.
And then, how should we treat the Canadiens supporters who live in Ottawa? Those from the Calgary Flames who live in Edmonton? Those from the Maple Leafs who… oh no, forget it, outside of Toronto, they are nowhere to be found. To resolve these cases, the researchers left out the games between two Canadian clubs. In short, they cleaned the data, they put it into the big statistics mixer, and dammit, they found a correlation.
Nine months after the unexpected victory of a Canadian club in the NHL, there is a slight increase of around 1% in births in the city of the winners.
“In the case of an unexpected victory, the partisans expected a defeat,” explain the researchers in the specialized publication Sports Economics Review. “We can believe that supporters were therefore more inclined to stay at home than to go out to bars or public places in anticipation of a victory. We assume that being in a private home after a match with a pleasant outcome is more conducive to bonding than being in a public gathering. Perhaps this can explain our results. »
Anticipated victories and defeats of any kind have no impact on the birth rate.
This may be good news for Quebec’s birth rate. Because this season, almost all of the Canadian’s victories are unexpected…
