Is your football team playing badly? It may
be air pollution. And what's happening to
plants?
Football fans have thousands of reasons to justify the, at times, lackluster athletic performances of
their idols. Apart, obviously, from “conspiracy theories” and referee plots, they range from the size
and state of the pitch, the color of the t-shirts, the bouncing capacity of the ball, and other theories.
A recent article published in The Guardian has introduced a new element: air pollution. In fact, a
group of German researchers has analyzed the correlations between air quality outside Bundesliga
football pitches and player performance by counting successful passes and the conclusions are
worrying.
Toxic substances, even below the threshold allowed by environmental regulations, are responsible
for significant reductions in the parameters chosen.
It is by no means the first time that air pollution has been associated with a decrease in human
physical (as well as cognitive) performance. For example, it has been assumed that if the daily
average of ozone goes down by 10 ppb, farmer productivity increases by 5.5%
(http://www.nber.org/papers/w17004). Remaining in the sport milieu, worries during the Beijing
Olympic Games (2008) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18512178), as well as during the
London
games
(2012)
(
http://www.decodedscience.org/london-2012-olympics-could-air-quality-affect-athlete-performance/16
274) were well-known, especially for the long-term competitive activities…
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