AIM: High-profile athletes are often promoted as role models, being portrayed as providing positive messages such as good health attitudes, which are assumed to be related to their success. As the logic behind using high-profile athletes as role models is also the argument for linking sports performance to not smoking, the objective of the present study was to compare publicly smoking players and non-smoking players with regard to their football performances during the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

METHODS: For each of the 736 players of the 32 teams officially registered for the 2014 FIFA World Cup the following data were collected through the official FIFA database: year of birth, position on the field (goalkeeper, defender, midfielder or forward), number of matches played, number of minutes played, number of goals scored and distance covered. The distance covered per minute played was also calculated. For every player the first 100 pictures on Google Pictures were screened for pictures showing the player smoking.

RESULTS: Smokers played an average of 246.7 minutes versus 175.4 minutes for nonsmoking players (t-test = 2.538; df = 734; p = 0.011). The distance covered per minute played was 0.11 for smoking players versus 0.10 for non-smoking players (t-test = 2.820; df = 63.5; p = 0.006).

CONCLUSION: The data of this study do not support the use football stars as role models for prevention campaigns, as the smokers appeared to perform better. Future studies should, however, try to control for the celebrity bias.