The Euro 2024 starts today

The UEFA Euro 2024 starts today with hosts Germany playing against Scotland. Time then to ask the most important question on everyone’s mind: Should I have sex before the game?

I think even the ancient Greeks thought that athletes should not have sex before a competition because it hurts their performance. And the restriction against wives and girlfriends visiting team hotels has been lifted by most teams only relatively recently.

So, what does the science say? Should I have sex before a match? Obviously, as a fan of the German national football team, I identify fully with my team and will do whatever is necessary to boost their performance, even if it is just by proxy. All in the name of science of course.

I checked the literature on the topic and found a meta-study that analysed nine prior studies on the subject. These nine studies measured the performance on standardised fitness tests for subjects that had sex between 30 minutes and 24 hours before the test was taken. The result was that there was no performance difference whether the subjects had sex or not. However, these nine studies were all done on male test subjects and only covered studies done until 2021.

In 2022, another study was published that asked 50 men to do squat exercises before and after having sex (“Honey, we need to get it on. It’s for a scientific experiment.”). This study found that after having sex, men were significantly weaker in their lower extremities.

Meanwhile, last year the only study I could find that included women was published. That study asked 869 Spanish amateur athletes (41% of which were women) if they had sex before a competition and how that affected their performance. About half of the athletes believed having sex would negatively influence their performance, while the other half believed it would do no harm. Yet 71% did have sex in the 24 hours before a competition with 7.5% of them as late as one hour before the start of the competition.

When asked how these athletes felt before the competition started but after having sex, 21.4% said they felt tired or sleepy. This surprises me because 33% said that the sex they had lasted more than one hour. Feel free to reach for your preferred cliché about Spaniards but having sex for an hour or more sounds very exhausting to me.

Feelings before a competition but after having sex

Source: Alonso-Aubin et al. (2023)

These feelings of tiredness or hyperactivation and motivation shown above roughly correspond to the actual performance vs. expectations. 31.5% of athletes report performing better than expected after having sex while 17.2% report performing worse than expected.

Athletic performance vs. expectation

Source: Alonso-Aubin et al. (2023)

So, I would draw the conclusion that whether you are having sex before a competition or not doesn’t make much of a difference, but at least you think that you are doing better than expected. And that is probably motivation enough to support your team with some bedroom warmup before a match.