Same! That’s where the idea came from. Fortunately my high school soccer coach was also my first block psychology teacher and he was in just as bad of shape as I was 🤷‍♂️

Awesome, thank you!

This paper is joint work with @peternka.bsky.social and our outstanding former grad student, Noah Meyers-Richter. This project was originally Noah's master's thesis, which he just defended in May! We welcome any comments you may have!

Our findings have broader implications for understanding the cost of sleep loss, especially when it is voluntary and recreation-based. Our results suggest that increased policing around late-night events or public service announcements during games may mitigate these harms.

We estimate that late-night World Cup matches were associated with an increase of 28.8 total deaths on the days following German matches. Using the 2024 DOT estimate of the Value of a Statistical Life, this represents a cost of $394.6 million.

We run a placebo where we repeat our analysis using the 2006 World Cup in Germany, where all games took place during the day for American fans. We find no effect, suggesting that our main results are driven by sleep loss and not the World Cup matches themselves.

Additionally, we show that our results are not driven by crashes involving alcohol or bad weather, and are driven by crashes involving 20-60-year-old males without children in the car, consistent with World Cup-viewing demographics.

This table displays our main estimates on PUMAs with 30, 40, and 50% German heritage, for all German games and then “big” German games. This demonstrates that there is a dose-response, with more heavily German PUMAs displaying a larger increase.

There are spikes in fatal accidents in the high-German PUMAs on five of the seven World Cup matchdays, including the opening match and each of the “knockout round” matches, which we define as “big” games.

This graph displays daily rates of fatal accidents for US PUMAs with >50% German heritage compared to PUMAs with <30 German heritage during the 2002 World Cup. German matchdays are marked with a vertical line.

Second, Germany has by far the largest number of Americans who trace their ancestry to a foreign country. This graph displays heritage from major countries involved in the 2002 World Cup from the 2000 Census. Germany is the only one who reached the semifinals of the tournament.

Why Germany? Two reasons. First, Germany had a very successful tournament, making it all the way to the final. This means that they played the maximum number of games, and played in the games with the highest television ratings.

We track fatal accidents in areas with large German populations on days when the German national team played early morning games. Areas with greater than 30% German heritage experienced increases in fatal car accidents of 35% relative to control areas.

Because the tournament took place in Korea/Japan, matches occurred during normal sleeping hours for Americans. This meant that devoted fans had to sacrifice substantial amounts of sleep to follow their team throughout the tournament.

Estimating the causal impact of sleep loss is challenging because sleep is highly correlated with other health behaviors. We use the 2002 Men’s World Cup, which took place in a South Korea/Japan, as a source of exogenous variation in sleep loss for American soccer fans.