There’s an idea in soccer that getting a red card and being down a player can actually make a team stronger. That going from 11 to 10 players forces a team to fight harder to protect their end and to hustle more quickly to score goals. But does that idea actually hold up on the pitch? Does the team actually become harder to beat? That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Mat Dowsett.

Dowsett is a Senior Expert in Lean Six Sigma with Roboyo, a global company specializing in automation and process improvement. In his free time, he is fond of the statistics side of process improvement and as a sports lover enjoys using statistics to answer tricky problems or to explore well-known myths. He recently authored an article in Significance about whether red cards can actually make soccer teams tougher.