I don’t know anything about soccer. Is there some meaning to the non-integral number of goals in 2006, 2014 and 2018?
He played multiple games in each of those World Cups. I expect the numbers are averages over those games. He’s only played one so far this year and scored three goals in that one.
I don’t know that much either, but I hazard a guess this means Messi doesn’t score a goal in every game. And so far in 2026 he’s scored an average of 3 goals per World Cup game, probably a statistical outlier for the moment that is almost guaranteed to drop, not continue ever-upward.
Y’know, now that you mention it, this comic does appear to be about a function that starts off oscillatory on the left and then goes exponential on the right…
Ah, I didn’t realize that the World Cup is multiple games. That makes sense now.
32 teams run onto the field at once! Last man alive wins! 
And it still ends in a
nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil/nil tie half of the time
Hey, I said I don’t know anything about soccer!
I guess I thought it was like the Superbowl, where all but two teams have been eliminated earlier.
If you want an analogy to (American) football, think of it as a season in five weeks.
There are 12 divisions (soccer: groups), each of four teams each of which plays every other team in its group, and the top two teams in each division move on to the playoffs (soccer: knockout rounds) along with the top eight third-place teams, sort of like wildcards.
Then, it’s a 32-team single-elimination tournament.
All those teams and games = FIFA money. No different from professional leagues in any major sport. All about the Benjamins.
To be fair, the minnows are having a surprisingly good cup so far and have given us interesting games and even upsets (for example Cape Verde holding favorites Spain to a draw)
Add to that the happiness of the countries’ populations at just the very fact of being in the World Cup at all and I have to say it wasn’t a bad idea.
Check this guide if you are interested in the Greatest Event in the Word[1]:
Sporting Event you mean? NO, the Greatest, period. ↩︎
“Brace yourself–the chirp gets pretty weird.”
Where can I get a prescription for that? Asking for a friend.
Yep, the thrills of quadrupole radiation.
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small —
But the ones with quadropole modulation don’t do anything at all - go ask Einstein
“The plural of anecdote may not be data, but the singular of data is anecdote.”
For a reminder of “p-hacking”:
