Despite its universality, discussion of the menstrual cycle is still considered taboo in many societies, resulting in a lack of understanding of the associated issues. One such issue is anxiety about leakage, which causes a lack of confidence among women wearing white pants.
Previous studies that used semi-structured interviews reported that some female athletes felt uncomfortable playing in white shorts (Pinel et al., 2022), which could distract them from the task at hand (Findlay et al., 2020). If only one player is troubled by wearing white shorts, then the average strength of her team is reduced, giving the opponents an advantage.
Teams in white shorts lose more often
Recently, I published a study in which I investigated whether wearing white shorts is not only not comfortable but also influences the result of a game. For that, I utilized data from all the games played at the Women’s FIFA World Cups and the UEFA European Championships from 2003 to 2023. In 67.5% of these games, one of the teams played in white shorts.
Figure 1 shows that women’s teams that played in white shorts achieved on average 0.3 fewer points per game than did their opponents. (A team winning in 90 or 120 minutes gets three points, a draw is worth one point, and a losing team gets zero points.)
One alternative explanation for this result could be that teams in white shorts are simply weaker than their opponents and therefore achieve fewer points per game. However, Figure 2 obviates this concern by showing that teams in white shorts were not only not weaker, but on average even had slightly better FIFA World Rankings than did their opponents who played in non-white shorts. This suggests that the real difference is likely to be even larger than the one shown in Figure 1.
In addition, I conducted a similar analysis for all the games from the Men’s FIFA World Cups and the UEFA European Championships from 2002 to 2022; in 73% of those games one team played in white shorts. As expected, I found no difference in the number of points per game between the teams in white and non-white shorts. In fact, the null finding in men’s soccer along with a significant effect in women’s soccer support the notion that the mechanism of the negative effect among women likely relates to leakage anxiety, as such anxiety is well documented among women, but for obvious reasons, not among men.