Ian Graham
speaker
54 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 18 Jul
Ian Graham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yeah, so genuine luck is something completely outside the team's control.
But that's not usually what we think about when we think about luck.
Luck really is a shorthand for things that are difficult to predict, things that are difficult to control.
And the real reason driving that is the low scoring nature of the game.
So in football, there's typically 2.5 to 3 goals per game.
And whether a chance becomes a goal or not is very uncertain.
If you compare that to a game like basketball, which has hundreds of scoring events per game,
or a game like tennis, where it has hundreds of points per tennis match.
The low score in nature of football leads it to being not very predictable, or we could say leads it to having a higher percentage of games whose outcome is more down to luck than down to skill.
Yes and no.
So I think this tournament's the first one where seeding has been in place that keeps the best teams apart until the semi-finals.
So...
It's hard to compare with previous tournaments.
That being said, it's pretty unusual that this was the result.
So we simulated the tournament 100,000 times.
We found the most likely set of semi-finalists.
It was the set of semi-finalists that was observed.
But we also found there's only about a 0.9% chance that all four of those teams would qualify for the semi-finals.
So XG stands for expected goals.
It's one of the worst names in sport.
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