England might score at the Euros, but don’t bet on a baby boom

If football comes home, it’ll be a miracle. At least if England’s grim performance on Friday is anything to go by. But if England do somehow win Euro 2020, once we get over the shock there will be a lot of celebrating – at least in one part of the kingdom – albeit of a socially distanced kind.

People speculate that a tournament win might mean a Boris bounce and a baby boom. The first could see the Tories cling on in key marginals, but who knows if any politician would get the credit?

What we do know is that forecasts of a baby boom are nonsense. So finds new research from two Italian economists subtly titled “more goals, fewer babies”. They examine monthly birthrates for 50 European countries from 1960 to 2016 and compare them with the performance of the national teams in 13 European Championships and 14 World Cups.

Far from delivering a baby boom, it turns out that national footballing success is associated with a fall in births nine months later. In trying to explain that result, the paper sees some evidently awkward economists wrestling with appropriate language. They hypothesise that their findings are “explained by individuals’ time allocation choices” resulting in less “physical intimacy time”. The word sex appears once (in the title of another paper that gets referenced).

The lesson? Don’t count on football for a fertility boost or economists for straight talking.

• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org