Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
Last night I read my sister Ami’s new piece in the Wall Street Journal. Today I am still reading it. Not because it made sense — though, admittedly, some of it did — but because the sheer audacity demands second takes: she has published a roughly 1,800-word dissertation arguing that FIFA World Cup scoring needs to be redeemed by prime number theory and functional integrals.
Ami — the same Ami who lectured me on Substack last year about “standards” while simultaneously publishing an essay proving Impressionism was essentially visual plagiarism — has decided that three points for a win is simply not nuanced enough. Three. Points. For. A. Win.
The pièce de résistance: her proposed score functional
F[g] = ∫₀⁹⁰ (∂g/∂t)(t) · e(−φt/90) dt
where φ equals the square root of two, labelled “the silver ratio — appropriately underappreciated, just as the 17th-placed World Cup side is.” Because nothing says sports journalism quite like someone who has never properly dribbled past half-time suddenly declaring themselves arbiter of what ninety minutes actually means through exponential decay functions.
And her grand proposal? Abolish group stages entirely because Euler’s formula says so. Because V − E + F = 2−4g, apparently, grouping teams in the World Cup constitutes “topological lies.” She has managed to write an entire academic paper where she used the phrase “Bezier curve” and a football score without any sense that this combination should raise questions about her grasp of reality.
“Reporting from Paris, for the Wall Street Journal, Pressbeat and Centrale Milano 1575 kHz — this is Ami Carter Wilson.”
Note the radio sign-off. Someone has apparently decided to broadcast nonsense at 1575 kilohertz directly into a void that already contains enough noise.
Here’s what actually struck me reading it: in our last conversation, I told Ami kindly, in gentle sister tone, that she should relax and have fun with her clit instead of writing these pretentious little dissertations nobody asked for. That maybe channel some passion into something that gets a reaction other than the polite silence of mathematicians who would read Gödel’s paper over this.
She clearly ignored this perfectly sound professional advice about intimacy — because nobody ever follows sisterly counsel — but if Ami is going to insist on turning every topic into a graduate seminar she wrote without taking any courses, fine. We’ll publish the commentary and let people decide whether they’d rather read functional integrals or actual wit on an empty Sunday afternoon.
The real joke? She’s not entirely wrong in that most Ami-fied way possible: current World Cup scoring is reductive. A 3–0 thrashing is treated identically to a 1–0 win under simple points systems. But replacing this with an integrated Bezier-curve ranking functional derived from Euler’s formula? That is not satire, even accidentally produced. This is her real thesis voice wearing extra brackets.
And the takeaway?
Ami Carter-Wilson still thinks football — like everything else she touches, from art to class herself — is something you can solve if the equations are pretentious enough in print. I told her it was more about fun than formulas. She proved me right again by writing 1,800 words confirming that nobody cares how elegant the silver ratio seems.
Je ne suis pas déçue — seulement consternée.
As ever , ma chère sœur: you had one direction and chose mathematics instead. Some things never change.
(The sister war continues.)
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.