Sports

Blame Air Pollution Why Your Football Team Plays Badly

Your favorite professional football or soccer team may be suffering from butterfingers -- or in this case, butterfeet -- but this may not be the only thing keeping them down.

In the past, teams have attempted to explain the dilemma by saying the ball is too bouncy or the pitch is too small, and even going as far as saying they are forced to play in the wrong colors kit.

Now, a group of German health economists has found another factor that may be affecting the performance of football players. The culprit? Air pollution.

Scientists at the IZA economic institute will present theirfindings [PDF] at this year's annual Royal Economic Society meeting in Brighton. Their study is based on analysis of the form of players in Germany's Bundesliga from 1999 to 2011.

The research team, which is comprised of Andreas Lichter, Eric Sommer, and Nico Pestel, measured the total number of passes each player made in their official matches.

The number of passes is not used as a measure of physical performance, the team said. Instead, it serves as the productivity indicator because it is related to the speed of the game.

More importantly, the team said the quantity of passes is vital to a team's success by retaining possession of the ball and creating opportunities for scoring. It also provides a reliable indicator in which passing is the nature of the game, limiting the roles of chance.

After calculating the number of passes, it was then compared against hourly air pollution data which was gathered by the German Federal Environment Agency outside each stadium.

The health economists discovered that at kick-off on any given match, the concentration of pollution or particulate matter was 23.8 micrograms per cubic meter. In nearly half of the games, the level of pollution ranged between 20 to 50 micrograms per cubic meter.

The European Union's threshold for particulate pollution regulation is at 50 micrograms per cubic meter. This limit was exceeded in 7 percent of the games.

With that, researchers found that the performance of players was hindered by pollution even at low levels. High levels above the EU threshold revealed a significant decline in performance by as much as 16 percent.

Players who were aged above 30 years old as well as players who exert large numbers of passes were most affected. The productivity of midfielders and defenders were also affected.

"Our analysis highlights that economic consequences of environmental pollution are not limited to adverse impacts on population health," the team wrote.

Additionally, the research team found that the shorter the gap was between matches, the more pronounced were the air pollution effects.

Meanwhile, there is some evidence that players may be adapted to the higher levels of air pollution and that they may tend to adjust their style of play.

The findings are most likely to be examined further than the world of professional football. Scientists also want more work to be done to evaluate the effects of air pollution on other professions and broaden the positive effects of environment regulation.

Survey Result

Delhi

Delhi's air pollution is a classic case of environmental injustice

Many of Delhi’s cars, by contrast, continue to burn particulate-heavy diesel. Researchers have measured concentrations of hazardous ultra-fine particles on the city’s arterial roads that are eight times higher than those recorded on rooftop monitors just a kilometre away.

The health impacts on residents are becoming more and more evident. Children’s developing bodies are especially susceptible to long-term harm. A 2008 study for India’s Central Pollution Control Board reported that more than two-fifths of Delhi’s schoolchildren have reduced lung function, damage that is likely to be irreversible.

The good news is that there is rising demand from India’s citizens for cleaner air, coupled with greater willingness of Delhi’s populist Aam Aadmi (roughly translated as common man) government, elected a year ago, to respond. Delhi needs ambitious, longer-term policies to tackle root causes of the problem. These must include not only steps to halt the exponential growth in car traffic and diesel trucks but also huge new investments in public transportation, tougher pollution controls on the smoke-belching power plants and brick kilns that ring the capital’s perimeter, and measures to reduce the clouds of dust from construction debris and road traffic.

Beneath the headlines, Delhi’s air pollution is not only a public health disaster; it is a classic case of environmental injustice. The city’s affluent classes reap the lion’s share of the benefits from the activities that poison the air, while less privileged residents bear most of the human health costs. This fateful disjuncture – and the inequalities of wealth and power that lie behind it – has posed the single biggest impediment to addressing the problem.

It remains to be seen whether the authorities in Delhi can muster the political will to go beyond stopgap emergency measures and launch the policies that are desperately needed to safeguard the public interest in a clean environment against the private interests of the polluting classes. Will India, often hailed as the world’s largest democracy, be able to overcome the oligarchy that rules its air? The poor who bear the heaviest air pollution burdens wish they could hold their breath long enough to find out.

Projects on Pollution: IIT-M students research triggers in specific locations

Pollution: IIT-M students research triggers in specific locations

With low-cost sensors and pollution monitoring equipment in their backpacks, students of IIT Madras are venturing out to research on pollution triggers in specific locations across the city.

Taking a hyper-local approach to study rising levels of air pollution, the students hope to identify areas in the city that need to be monitored for air quality and eventually zero in on triggers in the worst-affected localities.

Focussing on such areas first is key to reducing overall pollution levels in the city, they believe.

For a start, the students have chosen four locations: Manali (industrial site), T Nagar (commercial site), Perungudi (dump site), and the IITM campus as a background site with forest cover. Their findings have so far shown a significantly high level of particulate matter in the industrial and commercial sites.

Chennai is among the 72 cities that have non-attainment areas -locations where pollution levels are higher than the ambient air quality standards. The long term goal of the research is to identify these non attainment areas and the pollution triggers that persist in such locations.

"The whole of Chennai city cannot be a non-attainment area. Looking at the city level will not yield any in-depth finding as fixed monitoring stations are restricted to a particular region. We need location specific data to identify where the focus should be. Tackling pollutant levels in such non-attainment areas will automatically bring down the overall pollution levels,"says Prof Shiva Nagendra from the Department of Civil Engineering, IITMadras.

Jyothi S Menon, a third year student of civil engineering, uses an optical spectrometer coupled with a GPS system to study the concentration of particulate matter.

Jyothi, who began her research a few months ago, measured particulate matter in the winter months and hopes to capture data for the other seasons to get an idea over the fluctuating levels during the year.

"The PM concentration levels are very different depending on the local activity. Areas that have a lot of commercial activity all around showed high levels of pollution that could impact health,"she said.

A commercial locality like T Nagar showed that PM concentration is very high in the peak evening hours, while a dump site like Perungudi showed that the dust and particulate matter suspension levels were very high through the day due to activities like sifting, truck movement and diesel exhaust.