In November 2022, Julien Guyon published an article in Le Monde and was interviewed in L’Equipe. He explained how to compute the draw probabilities of the round of 16 of the UEFA Champions League, a neat math problem which passionates football fans and is not as easy to solve as it looks! His calculations were also presented in the popular French TV program L’Equipe du Soir.
Julien Guyon has extensively published articles on fairness in sports in top-tier journals, including The New York Times, Le Monde, The Times, El País, as well as in academic journals; a list is available on his web page. Topics have included:
– proposition of fairer draw procedures for the FIFA World Cup, one of which was adopted by FIFA in 2018. Here are links to the published version, a New York Times article and a draw simulator. The whole story was summarized in The Conversation.
– a fairer knockout bracket for the UEFA Euro, also adopted by UEFA in 2020
– risk of collusion for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (48 teams, 16 groups of 3) and proposition of fairer formats
– calculation of draw probabilities for the FIFA World Cup