WS More or Less: Leicester City football fluke?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the beginning of the season of the English football Premier League, few people would have been brave enough to predict that Leicester City would finish top. But was it that surprising?
Tim Harford speaks to Lord Finkelstein, a political journalist, who has been running his own statistical model to assess the teams in the Premier League. We also hear from James Yorke from the football analytics website Stats Bomb. Was Leicester’s success down to the team’s skills, or was it down to luck?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Tim Harford. You're listening to the shorter World Service edition of more or less. |
| 0:05.0 | First broadcast on Friday the 6th of May, and this is an extended treatment of just how lucky Lester |
| 0:11.6 | City have been. |
| 0:13.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:17.0 | We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, |
| 0:20.0 | and I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:28.0 | This week the mathematics of football. Because as you may have heard, the unfancied and underfunded club, Leicester City |
| 0:39.7 | have ended up defying 5,000 to one odds to win the English Premier League. |
| 0:45.3 | We spoke to Joe Prince Wright who covers English football for the American Network, NBC. |
| 0:51.0 | Before this year, Joe Prince Wright was one of the pundits with the very best |
| 0:54.2 | forecasting record around not this year his predictions were a disaster. |
| 0:59.2 | This season has just been an absolute spanner in the works for everyone. |
| 1:03.0 | I think most of us had Lester being relegated. |
| 1:06.0 | Nobody had them in the top half. |
| 1:08.0 | Nobody had them above 15th from our panelists at NBC. |
| 1:11.0 | For Lester the season to do it consistently. I still think that that's been |
| 1:15.2 | absolutely remarkable and I don't see how anybody could have predicted that. |
| 1:19.7 | The 5,000 to 1 odds weren't a mistake, according to Lord Danny Finkelstein. |
| 1:29.5 | He's a British journalist and political advisor, but his real passion is a fearsome football forecasting computer |
| 1:36.0 | model known as the think tank. |
| 1:38.6 | It was at least as extraordinary as the book is suggested, perhaps even more extraordinary, if you simulate the League a hundred |
| 1:44.1 | thousand times, you wouldn't find 20 victories for Leicester City, you'd find fewer than that. |
... |
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