Do we learn more from defeat than from victory? Do we learn more from victory than from defeat? The country is delirious with joy after beating Denmark 2 - 1 last night. But experts say it is not winning but losing that makes us stronger.

They would. Despite Denmark's best efforts, England could not be stopped. If football has not come all the way home, it is a good deal closer now. The Three Lions will face Italy in the final. No England team has achieved such a feat in Gareth Southgate's lifetime.

When people say that football is a matter of life or death, they are not exaggerating.

Researchers have found that more babies are born nine months after a major football victory, and fewer born after a defeat. Crime rates go down in the euphorian of winning, and violence rises when a nation loses.

No wonder, then, that politicians have been cheering. Last week, the UK prime minister Boris Johnson posed in the middle of a giant St George's CrossThe prime minister standing atop an England flag did not go down terribly well with some in the other constituent nations of the United Kingdom, especially in Scotland. draped across Downing Street.

In his poem, If, Rudyard Kipling praised those who can "meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostorsPeople assuming a false identity. just the same". The evidence from football suggests that this is hard to do. What experts claim we can do, however, is treat both as an opportunity to learn.

One reason Napoleon Bonaparte is often said to be the greatest general in history is that he could see what his victories had in common: movement. His rapid manoeuvres were copied for nearly 100 years.

Like Napoleon, the Dutch football manager Rinus Michels had a key insight that transformed the game forever: football is about using empty space. After he won the European cup for Ajax, he went on to use his new tacticsKnown as Total Football, the philosophy is that any outfield player can take over the role of any other player in a team. to lead the Dutch national team in 1974 to its first world cup final

Football fever

Some have even taken their success in one field and transferred the lessons to another. The author Toni Morrison was the first black woman to be an editor in an American publishing house. Her successes drove her to greater heightsMorrison won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993. Her novel Beloved is often named as one of the greatest of the 20th century. in her own writing.

For many, however, defeat is when lessons are really learnt. When the Roman republic suffered a humiliating defeat at the battle of Aurausio in 105BCE, Gaius Marius saw that the army needed reform. The new Roman army, known as the Marian legions, helped Rome to become a mighty empire.

Likewise, when Henry Ford's Detroit Automobile Company went bust, he realised that the cars he made were too expensive. So, he came up with a car that middle-class Americans could afford. The Ford Model T went on to revolutionise the industry.

Perhaps the most serious reckoning with defeat came in Germany after World War Two. Because of the horror of the war and of the crimes they had committed, Germany rethought its entire culture. The Germans now have a word for confronting the lessons of the past: VergangenheitsbewaltigungMeaning "working through the past", the word refers to a cultural movement in Germany to learn from the experience of Nazism. Studying the Holocaust is part of the school curriculum and monuments, memorials and museums have been built to preserve the memory of the atrocities..

Do we learn more from victory than from defeat?

Not at all, say some. Victory makes you lazy. If you think you are doing well, you will not work to improve. Defeat forces reflection. You have to think about what went wrong and what you might have done differently. Everyone has to fall over before they learn to walk. Besides, failure is inevitable sooner or later. The most important lesson is how to live with defeat.

Of course, say others. Defeat is such a blow to your self-esteem that it is hard to learn anything from it. Studies have shown that people do not learn well from feedback when they have failed at a task. The pleasure in victory helps you focus on what went right - and even what went wrong. While you can learn from others' defeats, your own are hard to see objectively. To learn, you have to put the experience of defeat behind you.