On Saturday night, musical acts from twenty-six countries will assemble in the Lisbon Arena, in Portugal, for the grand finale of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The contest, which débuted in 1956, is among the longest-running television programs in the world, and, as a new study in the journal BMC Public Health notes, it “attracts a wide range of individual countries’ talent, including orc-style monsters (Finland 2006), singers on unicycles (Moldova 2011) and puppet turkeys (Ireland 2008).” Despite this, and because of it, the contest is closely watched; in 2016, Eurovision broadcasts reached more than two hundred million viewers, including ninety-five per cent of the residents of Iceland.

This year, the oddsmakers favor Cyprus, with the song “Fuego,” by Eleni Foureira. (“Take a dive into my eyes / Yeah, the eyes of a lioness.”) The U.K., Slovenia, Albania, and Serbia are expected to fare the worst. But, if science is any indicator, the supporters of any given nation, even the ones that perform poorly, will be happier for having participated. In the new study, researchers at Imperial College London found that people reported being more satisfied with life if their country had competed in the Eurovision Song Contest that year—even if the performance was “terrible,” defined as placing twentieth or lower in a field of two dozen.

For raw data, the researchers, led by Filippos Filippidis, of Imperial’s School of Public Health, turned to the Eurobarometer, a series of public-opinion surveys that has been carried out in all the countries of Europe since 1973. Twice a year, the surveys include the question, “On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied or not at all satisfied with the life you lead?” Filippidis and his colleagues analyzed responses from more than a hundred and sixty thousand people, from thirty-three European countries, between 2009 and 2015—specifically in the spring, just after the Eurovision final. The study controlled for a range of factors, including the respondents’ age, gender, employment and marital status, and whether they’d had difficulty paying their bills in the previous twelve months.

Researchers elsewhere have found that national contests can have a positive effect on the populace. According to a study from 2002, workers in the city that is home to the winner of the Super Bowl earn slightly more than they did before, perhaps reflecting an improvement in productivity. (Across the country, however, productivity plummets on the Monday after the Super Bowl.) Something similar seemed to hold true in the wake of Eurovision. Citizens of countries that took part in the competition were at least thirteen per cent more satisfied with their lives than citizens of those that didn’t. Finishing ten places higher in the final standings, meanwhile, translated into a four-per-cent improvement in reported life satisfaction. (However, winning the contest outright didn’t provide any extra boost.)

The researchers were careful to note that they had identified a correlation, not a causal relationship. Still, they wondered aloud what might be going on. Given that the contest is based on popularity, and thus subject to the usual political and economic winds, perhaps success in Eurovision is a gauge of how well a country is doing socioeconomically, which might affect how satisfied people feel. (Or maybe not: in 2016, Ukraine won the contest for the first time in a dozen years, with a song called “1944,” which included the lyrics, “When strangers are coming / They come to your house / They kill you all.”) The researchers did note that they didn’t take into account the order in which the musical acts appeared—and that performances toward the end of the program are more likely to receive better scores.

It has been two decades since the U.K. won the Eurovision contest (for “Love Shine a Light,” by Katrina and the Waves, in 1997), and lately some voices have agitated for a Brexit-style withdrawal from the event. The results from the Filippidis study suggest that this might be a bad idea. “We found that participating in the ESC and doing badly is better than not participating at all,” the authors write. “Thus, there is no public health risk in taking part, as even an abysmal performance would be better than complete absence from the contest.” They added, with a reference to Eurovision songs from 2003 and 2011, “Even being the Cry Baby of the Contest has more public health benefits than Running Scared away from it.”