Bill Edgar
speaker
46 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2012
last heard Dec 2014
Bill Edgar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My number for 2014, or rather my height for 2014, is 6 foot 3 and a half, that's 1 metre 92, which is the average height of a Premier League goalkeeper at the moment.
Now that compares with 40 years ago when the average height of a top-flight goalkeeper was only 6 foot 0 inches, a little under in fact, and that works out at 1 metre 83.
Football can only hope that this increase in height that it's seen over the past 40 years doesn't continue because there would be severe problems.
The average goalkeeper by the end of this century would be 6 foot 10 inches tall, which is 2.1 metres tall.
And by the year 2251, the average keeper would be 8 foot 0 inches tall, which is 2.4 metres and also the height of the crossbar.
So they'd be at risk of bumping their head on it.
them i am bill edgar i cover statistics in football for the times and i'm the author of back of the net 100 golden goals we're just reaching the 20th anniversary of the last time an openly gay footballer played in the league in england that's the top four divisions justin fashioner was the last one and his career in england ended at torquay united
So I wanted to work out what the chances were that no league footballer in that time has been gay, whether openly so or not, assuming there was no reason for the proportion of gay footballers to differ from the proportion of gay people in society as a whole.
Many surveys have tried to decide what proportion of British men are gay.
Answers have ranged wildly from 1.5% to 6%, so I took the lowest figure of 1.5%.
In that 20 years, 13,600 players have appeared in the league.
Now the chance of picking 13,600 men randomly from the whole population, and none of those being gay, is one chance in 5 times 10 to the power of 90.
That's 1 in 5 with 90 noughts.
To make a slightly more understandable number, I then looked at Premier League players, of which there have been 3,200 in the past 20 years.
The chances of there being no gay footballer among those is 1 in 10 to the power of 21, which is 1 and 21 noughts.
Now, to illustrate exactly how unlikely that is, if the entire Earth's surface was covered with drawing pins edge to edge, the chance of you picking up one specific drawing pin at random would be 200 times higher than the chance of there being no gay player in the Premier League over the past 20 years.
No doubt there have been many gay players in the Premier League, but perhaps not as many as proportionately as in the country overall.
We don't really know.
Now, this situation is not confined to England.
There is no apparent record anywhere in the world of a top-class footballer who is openly gay.
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