Every four years if happens. If it is time for the German World Cup soccer team to play during working hours, German productivity drops dramatically for at least 90 minutes. About 23 million Germans watched this year’s first German World Cup game against Australia – more than a quarter of the 80 million population! It’s no different with Germans’ Swiss neighbors – this year their team won against Spain, the European champion and one of the odds-on favorites for the prize.

So, no one, especially no one in the media business, can evade World Cup enthusiasm (nigglers call it hype). But how to serve the “topic number one” as science editor? The problem is that (watching) soccer is supposed to be fun. So, articles about the physics of the ball might sound too weisenheimer-ish or – even worse – boring. Science reporting sticks to facts (mostly … from time to time … hopefully sometimes), and people may prefer that the myths of soccer be left alone -  like the quote of the famous English (!) rusher Gary Lineker: “Soccer is a game for 22 people that run around, play the ball, and one referee who makes a slew of mistakes – and in the end Germany always wins.” (Not quite always, I have to admit). So here is a little overview of how German language colleagues tried to contribute to worldwide soccer madness.

Die Zeit did some research to find the scientific proof for the most common soccer myths, which is fun to read – and helpful for gambling, too. The journal Zeit-Wissen did a not so serious interview with a German physicist, who found a formula, which proves (kind of), that Germany will win the WorldCup.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (full disclosure: I write for them, from time to time) chose to look back into the history of ball games, the Maya’s ball game, respectively (which is very different to soccer). It’s interesting to read, how important the game was for the social life of Maya, Olmec and other pre-columbian indian people – though this is not really new news.

The Frankfurter Rundschau provided hints for readers, especially parents, how to organize the TV consumption for kids – which is helpful and necessary, but, well, a little bit dry and uninspired, which is true, too, for the collection of WorldCup-websites for kids.

Due to the circumstances of the goal, which led to the historical success of the Swiss soccer team against Spain, the science section of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote about the difficulties of the referee to apply the offside rule (I won’t explain it here. US colleagues, who spent too much time following the wrong sports, might have a look here ;-). The article quotes a study, that 26 percent of all referee offside-decisions during the WorldCup 2002 were wrong. And according to a neuropsychologist from the University of Zurich, this is not the fault of the referee, but due to the “flash-lag-effect”, a psychological phenomenon, where the brain calculates the position of a moving object a little bit ahead of its real physical position.

I really liked an enjoyable small Tagesspiegel article, which arms soccer fans with important informatin – how could you possibly chat about a game, if you don’t know the right words. E.g.: Is “Elfenbeinküster” or “Ivos” or “Ivorer” the right word to describe the players from the Ivory Coast team (in German: “Elfenbeinküste”). Or what about some special soccer terms, like this one from Great Britain (!): “‘Butterfingers’ for english goalkeepers, who – for once – don’t catch very well” (I’m just quoting!). Starting point for this article was a press release of the Duden Verlag (a German spell checker institution), advertising a book about soccer language.

Die Welt wrote an interesting piece about researchers trying to explain the statistically significant effect of the “home field advantage”: “More testosterone during home field games” – kind of a territory defending behavior. Also, Norbert Lossau (head of the science section and former physicist) explains with a winking tone, that it is ok (from the perspective of physics and wastage of energy) to decorate cars with flags.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung writes about the “Objective Expert“, a software, which analyzes the performance of players. And another articles analyzes, “How superstition helps” soccer players’ psychology – worth reading not because of the soccer stuff, but because the author (Markus Schulte von Drach) discusses the positive and negative outcomes of superstitious believes.

The Financial Times Deutschland (no science section anymore) did not do much more, then picking up the party pooper news, that the noise of Vuvuzeelas might cause illness (actually, the headline said that they DO cause illness), and a (boring) quiz, where readers could check their knowledge about South Africa.

The Austrian Standard‘s science section was quite busy: An article about “soccer math” (quoting a math professor from Vienna’s Technical University), the “relativity of the ball” (see picture above), that soccer players have a reduced risk of injuries (here), a story about the Hepatitis C infections of the German WoldCup winning team of 1954 (here), and one about the typical injuries during the WorldCup games (here).

And last not least: The local Märkische Allgemeine had a piece remembering about the long term collaboration of the German Soccer Federation and the German Sports High School Cologne (DSHS). About 50 students helped to analyze the three teams, Germany has to face during the preliminary round. The data were fed into a special software, giving hints about the way these teams organize their style of play, who are the key players, who prefers short or long passes, etc. And these hints from science seem to make a difference: During the WorldCup 2006, the DSHS analysis of the Argentinian players and their preferred corners during penalties were summarized in a tiny notepad, which the German goalkeeper Michael Lehmann kept in his sock, read carefully before every single penalty, and which finally helped his team to win the quarter finals.

Sascha Karberg

(may the best team win

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2010 at 9:44 pm and is filed under ETC (grab bag), German Language Media, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.