Could Toxoplasma gondii help your country win the World Cup?

Xeni Jardin 5:12 pm Fri Jul 2, 2010

An interesting Slate piece points out a correlation between rates of infection by "cat poop protozoa"—that's Toxoplasma gondii— and success rates in soccer:

If we set aside the qualifying rounds (in which teams can play to a draw) and focus on matches with a clear winner, the results are very compelling. In the knockout round of this year's tournament, eight out of eight winners so far have been the teams whose countries had higher rates of Toxo infection. If we go back to the 2006 World Cup, seven out of eight knockout-round winners could be predicted by higher Toxo rates. The one exception to the rule was Brazil's defeat of Ghana, a match between two nations that each have very high rates. (Aside from having the winningest team in World Cup history, Brazil has quite a few cases of Toxo: Two out of three Brazilians are infected.)

It gets better. Rank the top 25 FIFA team countries by Toxo rate and you get, in order from the top: Brazil (67 percent), Argentina (52 percent), France (45 percent), Spain (44 percent), and Germany (43 percent). Collectively, these are the teams responsible for eight of the last 10 World Cup overall winners. Spain, the only one of the group never to have won a cup, is no subpar outlier–the Spaniards have the most World Cup victories of any perpetual runner-up.

Landon Donovan Needs a Cat
(Slate, thanks Farhad Manjoo)

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