Welcome, everybody to Soccer one-O-1. My name is Taylor Rockwell. On this podcast, we try to make sense of sometimes basic, sometimes convoluted things that might seem obvious, might seem difficult, but we try to get through them to make sense of their history, why they exist, what they mean, how they fit into the sport itself.

And today, it's a math episode, Graham Ruffin.

We're going to be talking coefficients, and that makes me nervous.

But it also makes me nervous because, prior to recording, I learned,

this is a thing that Scotland and maybe you take very, very seriously.

Yeah, so coefficients is...

We speak about coefficients on the show relatively frequently,

and that might not be something that listeners know much about. And I hope

that's not me being condescending. It's just that even hardcore European soccer fans whose

countries and clubs are impacted by coefficients, I don't think are maybe aware of how this works,

because if you're a fan of a Premier League team or if you're an England fan or something

like that, coefficients don't really affect really those clubs and those teams because

Premier League is always going to be ranked among the top countries in the coefficient table

or, you know, Man City are always going to be near the top of the club coefficients.

But for Scotland, those rankings have very real material impact on, for example, how many clubs we get into the Champions League. So Celtic getting put automatically into the group stage this season. That doesn't happen if Scotland's coefficient isn't in a good shape. So there are people who track this in Scotland. I would bet that we talk about coefficients maybe more than any other country

on the planet. And there's a particular Twitter account called Scotland's coefficient. It has over

20,000 followers. And this is a person who just tweets out updates on how the coefficient is doing

with every European and continental match. So yeah, this is a big, big talking point in

Scotland. Graham, I want to get into the actual structure of the show, but now I have to ask,

what are these conversations like? Because I am now picturing you sitting in a bar with some

friends, and she's been like, do you see the latest rankings? Do you see the latest numbers? I don't

know what to make of these. Like, are you all having Math chat over pints, or is it a bit more like, it's ridiculous?

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