Data confirm Temperature hurts Soccer Performance
Humidity is not an issue.
The media are buzzing with talk about how heat and humidity would form a challenge for soccer teams from temperate areas. Indeed, host country Brazil offers meteorological extremes during the winter of the southern hemisphere. Are these concerns grounded in reality?
In the era of abundant data, such questions need not remain unanswered. We compared public climate data to historical world cup records. For each world cup match we compared the climate in the host city to the conditions both teams usually experience and analyzed how the relative conditions affected average points yield. A victory yields three points, a draw one and losing none.
It turns out a difference in relative humidity probably doesn’t affect performance very much (p = 0.55). We did find a significant (p=0.037) effect of relative temperature on the expected tournament points.
y=1.3610-0.0124x
Apparently, it’s bad news to play in a hotter area. A temperature difference of ten degrees Celcius leads to a 0.124 or 9% reduction in expected tournament points. If you thought June and July in Rio are hot with an average temperature of 25 °C, 2018 world cup host capital Doha averages 40 °C in the same months. This would mean a temperature leap of 20 degrees for the British team, a whopping 18% disadvantage compared to the Qatari players. An adjusted training scheme with regular sunbathing is recommended.
This post was written and prepared by Jens de Bruijn and Tom Rijntjes, two Amsterdam-based data scientists. We’d love to crunch numbers for you, too.
