Is Your Favorite World Cup Player Getting Laid?

Let me begin this article by making a confession: I do not watch sports. I would probably only watch sports if someone held a gun to my head and threatened to blow my brains out unless I paid close attention to a game. However, I am re-discovering right about now that when the World Cup rolls around, it's impossible to not pay attention (although my way of "paying attention" is usually to run through the living room at random points and shout "GOOOAAAAAAL" when my family is trying to focus on the game). But for people like me, there are still plentiful points of interest — like whether the players are allowed to get laid during this whole soccer shebang or not.

Yeah, you read that right: there are sex rules for players. Or rather, there are for some teams, according to Quartz.

Certain coaches, like those of Mexico, Russia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, have imposed a naughty business ban. According to the Daily Star, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian coach said the following in April:

There will be no sex in Brazil. … I am not interested what the other coaches do, this is not a holiday trip, we are there to play football at the World Cup.

Added Mexico's coach Miguel Herrera:

“If a player can't go one month or 20 days without having sexual relations, then they are not prepared to be a professional player...so then we will not be looking for sex or having sex at the World Cup just to have it, we are going to go after what we came for, a competition that gives us the opportunity to rise above and do something really great."

So...sex and "doing something really great" are apparently incompatible. All right, then...

Brazil's coach, meanwhile, has banned his players from having particularly "acrobatic" sex, without elaborating on what that could mean. (Although, come on, we all know that he's probably talking about these kinds of crazy bedroom moves...which no one but a super-toned athlete could perform, anyway.)

It seems that many coaches nurse a suspicion that getting it on can distract their players or even injure them, decreasing their performance potential. However, there is no scientific evidence to back this up. A 1995 study monitored the performance of 11 men, some of whom had had sex 12 hours before and some of whom had not, on a treadmill. There was no difference between those who got some and those who got none. But despite the lack of hard facts, coaches and fans alike go bananas speculating on what's healthy and what's not when it comes to players' bedroom activities. And as a non-superfan, that seems, well, sort of intrusive to me. But then again, I, like Jon Snow, know nothing.

Here's the actual infographic so you can school yourself. And, if you want other World Cup/sex-related news, it looks like all the spectators are going to have plenty of opportunities to get laid through prostitution...which could spell trouble for those who have to turn to sex work out of necessity.

Images: Getty Images; Animated Gifs, Tumblr; Quartz