⚽📚 Football and books have always competed for students’ attention — but now there are numbers showing who wins that battle.
A study published in the Journal of Public Economics analyzed the final exams of millions of students in England during years with football tournaments (World Cups and European Championships) versus years without competition. The result is so specific that it is hard to ignore: when there is a tournament, the percentage of students who manage to pass falls by 12% on average. But if the student is a declared football fanatic, that number shoots up to a 28% drop in performance. 📉
Put another way: one out of every four students passionate about football who would have passed in a normal year fails when there is a World Cup involved. The study does not judge whether football is good or bad — it only makes it clear that when your national team plays, your brain has very different priorities from microeconomics. Do you identify with those numbers? 🙋♂️