> a subset of teams get paired dispropotionally often in UEFA Champions League when compared to random

To the point they have rules that prevent the same game from being played by two teams in the same home stadium for 3 straight years. Not sure how they handle this. Do they just redraw if that pairing is drawn, do the hold back one of the team's ball from the bag, or do they manually set one of the teams against another from the pool before drawing the remaining?

If the draw is truly random there will always be some outlier stats. Their 25/26 example, the 5 teams are from pots 1,2,3,3,4 so it’s pretty even

Yes, same. Initially this seemed like an article I should love, but it was basically impossible to get through, so I stopped reading.

This is a fairly cynical way to look at it. Consider the scenarios:

Pre-LLM, most researchers wouldn't have bothered writing it up outside of a journal. They're extremely busy people, and it takes a lot of effort to write a well polished post. They'll either hand that task off to a grad student or (much more likely) simply not post it anywhere.

Thanks to LLMs, we know about it. I've often been critical of academia for not making their work accessible to the masses. This is a step in that direction.

Existing academics' writing is very poor. Did you try reading the average Academic Joe's essays in the past? Much poorer quality (with much poorer images). LLM-speak is a step up.