No Sex Before the Match

In 2004, on Brazilian television, Ronaldo Nazário said something that most footballers think and almost none say out loud.

"I have had sex several times before some games. It helps you concentrate. Not all the coaches let you have sex before a match though. I have noticed that in some games that I played better because I had sex before them."

A World Cup winner, three-time World Player of the Year, stating plainly that one of the oldest taboos in sport had no hold over him — and that, if anything, the opposite was true. Ten years later, at the 2014 World Cup, four national federations would publicly disagree with him. All four would be home before the quarter-finals.

The Ban That Keeps Coming Back

Before the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile, Mexico, and Russia all imposed restrictions on sexual activity during the tournament. Bosnia's coach Safet Susic was characteristically blunt: "There will be no sex in Brazil. They can find another solution, they can even masturbate if they want. I am not interested what the other coaches do, this is not a holiday trip, we are there to play football." Mexico's coach Miguel Herrera offered a similarly unimpressed defence of his own ban: "Nobody has died from practising abstinence for 40 days."

These were not fringe positions. They sat inside a belief that has existed, in some form, since ancient Greece — that sexual activity, and ejaculation specifically, draws something vital away from an athlete's body. Roman and Greek trainers preached abstinence as a path to athletic purity. The belief survived because it felt intuitively true, not because anyone had ever tested it.

All four of the abstinence nations were eliminated by the round of 16.

This proves nothing on its own — eliminations happen to good and bad policies alike — but it is the kind of detail that earns a place in the conversation precisely because of how neatly it lands.

What the Science Actually Says

The honest answer, for most of football history, has been: nobody properly checked. Sports science largely avoided the question, partly from squeamishness and partly because rigorous studies are hard to design around something this private.

That has started to change. A systematic review covering decades of available research, published in Frontiers in Physiology, found that sexual activity does not measurably affect testosterone levels in the short or long term, and that no consistent effect on athletic performance — positive or negative — could be demonstrated across the existing literature. The myth of depletion, in other words, had never actually been supported by evidence. It had simply been repeated until it sounded like fact.

A more recent and considerably more rigorous study went further. Published in Physiology & Behavior, researchers followed 21 well-trained male athletes through a randomised crossover design, comparing performance thirty minutes after a masturbation-induced orgasm against performance following seven days of abstinence. The result directly contradicted the centuries-old assumption: exercise duration increased by 3.2 percent, testosterone and cortisol both rose rather than fell, handgrip strength improved slightly, and markers of muscle stress actually decreased. The researchers proposed that sexual activity may function as a kind of physiological primer — activating the same sympathetic nervous system response that a conventional warm-up does, releasing endorphins that reduce pain perception, and increasing motivation and confidence in the process.

None of this means sex makes anyone a better athlete by default. The sample size is small, the subjects were all young trained men, and the researchers themselves caution against overreaching. But the directional finding is consistent and clear: there is no evidence that sexual activity weakens performance, and there is now reasonably good evidence that, for some athletes, it does the opposite of what coaches have assumed for over a century.

Ronaldo Nazário was not making an excuse. He may have been describing something real.

Why the Myth Survived Anyway

If the evidence does not support abstinence, why has the belief lasted this long, across cultures and centuries, repeated by coaches who have no scientific basis for repeating it?

Part of the answer is psychological rather than physiological. Pre-competition rituals — including abstinence — function as a form of perceived control. An athlete facing an outcome they cannot fully determine reaches for any variable they can manage. Diet, sleep, superstition, sexual abstinence: all of it offers the same psychological service, regardless of whether it does anything measurable to the body. If a coach believes abstinence sharpens focus, and communicates that belief with total conviction, the belief itself can produce a kind of placebo discipline — not because semen retention does anything biologically, but because the ritual of self-denial signals seriousness, and seriousness is genuinely useful.

There is also a less flattering explanation, and it deserves more than a passing mention. The abstinence belief was never really about testosterone. It is about who gets to decide what a male athlete's body is for, and it rests on a specific, old idea: that a man's sexual desire is a finite resource, that spending it is a form of weakness, and that a coach — not the athlete — is the correct authority to manage that resource on his behalf.

Sit with what Susic's rule actually asked of his players. Forty days. Not a headache, not a minor inconvenience — forty days of watching his partner across a room in the team hotel and being told the wanting itself was the problem. Forty days of a body doing exactly what bodies do, and being informed that the doing was a discipline failure. "They can even masturbate if they want." Not encouragement. Not neutrality. A grudging allowance, delivered with visible contempt, as if the ache itself were an indulgence that had to be tolerated rather than a basic human need. The implication is that even release, alone, in private, is something a coach permits rather than something a grown man is entitled to.

That is not sports science. That is a specific, gendered idea about discipline — the belief that denying the body what it wants is itself a form of moral and competitive superiority, and that a real professional proves his seriousness by how much he is willing to give up, regardless of whether giving it up does anything at all.

No equivalent rule has ever targeted sleep deprivation from a crying newborn, or the anxiety of a new relationship, or grief. Only sex. Only pleasure. The selectivity is the tell.

The WAGs Problem

If the men's side of this story is about abstinence and superstition, the other half of football's relationship with sex is about the women connected to the players — and it tells a different, considerably less flattering story.

The term WAGs entered football culture around the 2002 World Cup and exploded into the mainstream by 2006 in Germany, when the British press constructed an entire parallel narrative around the wives and girlfriends of the England squad — their shopping, their nightlife, their proximity to the team hotel treated as a subplot worthy of equal coverage to the football itself. The framing was rarely flattering. WAGs were positioned as distraction, as decadence, as evidence that a team's focus had drifted from the only thing that was supposed to matter.

The logic curdled further by 2022. When Germany were eliminated in the group stage in Qatar, a German tabloid ran the headline "What is actually wrong with our WAGs?" — blaming the squad's partners for insufficiently energetic partying, while crediting England's WAGs, who had reportedly been livelier, with somehow contributing to England topping their group. The implied mechanism was never explained, because there isn't one. It was scapegoating dressed up as sports analysis: easier to blame the women in the stands than the eleven men who lost on the pitch.

Look at both halves of the story together and the double standard is stark, and it is not subtle. Men are told that sex might weaken them, so the correct response is abstinence — desire treated as a threat to be managed and rationed by someone else. Women, meanwhile, are blamed for not being entertaining or energetic enough to inspire their partners to perform — desire treated as a resource they are responsible for supplying on demand. One half of the story punishes women by casting them as a danger. The other half punishes women by casting them as a service. Neither version holds the players accountable for their own performance. Both versions find a woman to blame first.

What both halves of this story share — the abstinence rules and the WAGs blame cycle — is the same underlying instinct: control the variable that feels controllable, assign it outsized causal power, and use it to explain outcomes that are actually decided by far more mundane factors like fitness, form, and the quality of the opposition.

What Actually Matters

Strip away the myth and what remains is something almost absurdly intimate: a grown man, a professional athlete at the physical peak of his life, forbidden from touching the person he loves. Not told to rest. Not told to recover. Told no — to the ache of wanting her, to the warmth of her skin against his after weeks apart, to the release that every other human body on earth is permitted without a coach's signature.

Picture it plainly. She has flown across an ocean to be near him. The hotel room is fifty metres away. Every instinct in his body — the same instinct that made him extraordinary on a pitch, the desire, the hunger, the refusal to hold back — is suddenly the one thing he is told to suppress. Not because his body needs it. Because a man in a tracksuit believes, without evidence, that wanting her too much will cost him something on Saturday.

The 2026 research says the body was never built to punish him for this. It never withheld strength as the price of intimacy. Ronaldo Nazário knew that instinctively in 2004, before anyone had bothered to check.

It is also worth asking, honestly, who the ban actually serves. It costs a federation nothing to impose. It requires no investment, no infrastructure, no expertise. And if the team performs badly afterward, the ban becomes retroactively useful — evidence, however unfounded, that whatever went wrong was a discipline problem rather than a tactical or physical one. A coach who bans sex has manufactured himself an excuse before the tournament has even started. That is not a coincidence. That is a remarkably cheap form of insurance, purchased at the expense of the players' autonomy and, if the science is right, their actual performance.

Football has always been comfortable asking players to give things up. It has been considerably less comfortable asking whether the things it asked them to give up were ever actually costing them anything — or whether the real function of the sacrifice was never physiological at all, but a story a coach could tell afterward about why the team lost.