Sex teams

It's a long-held myth that athletes should refrain from sex before a competition, for fear of exhaustion or a lack of testosterone. Nearly all scientific studies agree that there's no danger, but the belief persists. To that end, managers for a number of countries have banned their players from having relations with loved ones or otherwise at the World Cup.

Creativity can suffer in mixed-sex teams. Men and women both experience uncertainty when asked to generate ideas as members of a mixed-sex work group: men because they may fear offending the women and women because they fear having their ideas devalued or rejected. Being PC helps men and women become more creative.

Having an orgasm won't lose you the World Cup it seems, with this most dodgy of principles being disproved by the fact that all four teams that publicly banned their players from having sex at the tournament have now gone out. Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile and Mexico, all of which imposed a no sex rule, have now been eliminated, suggesting that sexual frustration doesn't give players a crucial edge in terms of motivation. That said, countless teams that didn't ban sex have gone home too, so there isn't necessarily a correlation.

According to Timethese four teams have rules that ban pre-game sex. Others have specific guidelines. And it usually only burns 50 calories or less.

Every team at this year's World Cup abstaining from sex has failed to make it past the round of 16, which dispels the long-held theory that sex before football is a hindrance to performance. The four teams that completely banned their players from having sex during the World Cup - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile, Mexico and Russia - have all been eliminated and will walk away from the tournament empty handed. Six of the eight teams remaining in the World Cup have not specifically asked their players to abstain from sex, but have put in place specific guidelines regarding the duration and positions players can experiment with while they're in Brazil. There is an argument the four teams who weren't allowed to engage in a bit of hanky-panky wouldn't have qualified anyway, but the fact of the matter is teams with lax sexual sanctions have progressed further than their conservative opponents.

As a sex researcher, I've been thinking about how much the World Cup players have been thinking about having sex — even if they aren't supposed to be participating in sexual activity. The team-by-team rules governing players' sexual behavior during competition this year are varied, and the "evidence" that those rules matter is weak. But the round of 16 is nearly complete, and while no managers have sanctioned sex on the field, it would seem those countries that allow scoring off the field

When it comes to the World Cup, teams will do -- or not do -- just about anything to gain an advantage. Whether it's dictating how a team plays during games or how it plays between them, national team managers make the rules. In hopes of increasing the number of goals on the field, some teams prohibit players from scoring off of it. Herreras' no-sex philosophy, one shared by many boxers who famously abstained from sex before big fights, is not something that all coaches buy into.