Lionel Messi goals per calendar year

Lionel Messi's goals per calendar year and the US birth rate have, between 2016 and 2024, risen together at a correlation of 0.913. The suggestion that Messi is single-handedly responsible for American reproduction is so absurd that several comedy writers will, within the year, have a go at it. The actual cause is, depressingly, just the spreadsheet.

Messi's annual goals have remained in the 30-50 range through most years, with his 2023 MLS arrival at Inter Miami producing a late-career resurgence in a less-contested league. The US birth rate, meanwhile, has been broadly declining since 2007, with small fluctuations year to year. The positive correlation here is driven by a handful of overlapping data points that happen to move similarly over a short, noisy sample — a textbook case of a small-N correlation that would evaporate with more data. The two numbers are not in dialogue. The sample size is.

Nine years of two lines rising together, with both moving noisily, can describe a correlation that exists only because the dataset is short. The striker and the birth certificate are not connected. The statistics are being brief.