Lizzy McNeill
speaker
375 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2018
last heard 18 Jul
Lizzy McNeill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Well, according to David Sumter, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Uppsala University, yeah...
Kind of.
So even if you are a highly skilled team, there are plenty of opportunities to be unlucky over five matches.
So to answer our listener's question, you need a lot of luck in order to win the World Cup.
Despite all the randomness at play, in this year's World Cup there were still no underdogs in the semi-finals.
The last four teams in the tournament were all the highest ranked ones.
Could that be evidence that football is not so random after all?
But what about our listeners' other question?
How do we quantify luck and separate it from skill?
Well, one way to measure this is XG.
Or, in other words, each shot only has a 1 in 10 chance of becoming a goal, but not all shots are created equal.
Each time a team takes a shot, you look at the chance that the shot would have gone in, depending on where it's taken from, and you add it to the total XG.
The final XG then tells you how many opportunities that team made at the goal, regardless of whether the cards fell in their favour and the shot became a goal.
The team with the highest XG doesn't always win the game, but they will have had the most opportunities.
Because of the randomness of football, the most reliable thing a player can do is to create chances to be lucky.
Although, as David Sumter says, this isn't how the players are thinking about it.
Our thanks to Ian Graham, author of How to Win the Premier League, David Sumter, author of Soccermatics, and Luis Nunez-Vincente.
And that is all we have time for this week.
We'll be back next week, but if you've seen a number you think we should take a look at, email us at moreorless at bbc.co.uk.
Until next week, goodbye.
Showing 21–40 of 375 · page 2 of 19
← Previous
Next →