The point of all this is that if sports victories can create extra births, that’s a big deal. It turns out that researchers have actually studied the case of Barcelona’s 2009 win in the Champion’s League, and found tentative evidence of an increase in birth rates, although the effect was very local, barely noticeable at the national level. Because this event was very recent, we don’t know yet whether these births will be offset by fewer births somewhere down the road.

To my knowledge, this is the only study done of a sports-win fertility boost, and the effect was small, local, and lasted less than a year. Crucially, Barcelona’s win was not highly expected: surprise creates euphoria which leads to, ahem, babies nine months later.

So Iceland’s victory over England 10 months ago should be an ideal test case. We know that viewership of their victory was very high, and celebrations widespread. We know that the victory was very surprising. Iceland is small and the population very concentrated, which means it should be easy to detect any change. Finally, the country keeps meticulous records of vital statistics, which are made available online.

Unfortunately, monthly birth data for 2017 will not be available until 2018. So while it seems Iceland will make an amazingly good test case for the sports-wins-cause-babies hypothesis in the future, we just can’t say for sure yet whether it’s true. For now, reports of an Icelandic baby boom are a funny Internet meme, but not verifiable.