Thursday 14 February 2013

Football formulae: the maths behind the Champions League draw

A somewhat belated follow-up to this post, where I looked at the probability of the draw for the Champions League knockout stage matching the preceding day's rehearsal draw. We have an article for the print magazine in the pipeline, so this is a little short on detail, but there is a surprisingly large amount of interesting stuff behind this problem.

I can (hopefully) be heard discussing a small aspect of this on the BBC's World Service program More or Less this coming Saturday, at 1350 UTC, although I make no guarantees that my segment won't end up on the cutting-room floor.