Wandrille P.

Builder, football obsessive, former goalkeeper, Paris.

How this started

It started with comic books. As a kid, I read everything I could find about the history of the World Cup: the stories, the upsets, the players who changed the game. Football was never just a sport to me. It was a global narrative that somehow connected everyone.

Then came the 2018 World Cup. Watching those games, I kept thinking there was so much data behind every match, and yet most fans only ever saw the final score. That gap between what happened and what the numbers actually say is where Ultrivia was born. It took a few years to build, but the idea never left.

Why football, specifically

Football is the one sport that holds up a mirror to everything humanity has ever been through.

A kid can be born anywhere in the world, in Rosario, Douala, or Moscow, and become one of the greatest players the game has ever seen. Messi, Samuel Eto’o, Lev Yashin. Three different continents, three different worlds, one sport that gave all three of them the same stage.

Think about what else the game contains. Raymond Kopa, born Kopaszewski, son of a Polish miner in the north of France, becomes the best player in the world in the 1950s. Mesut Ozil, raised in the Ruhr valley by Turkish immigrants, wins a World Cup for Germany. Dutch teams across different eras were shaped in part by players whose families came from Suriname and Indonesia. These are not side notes to football history. They are football history.

Football is also a sport where luck stays central. A deflection, a post, a referee’s hesitation can completely rewrite the narrative. A team can dominate for 89 minutes and still lose. The best side does not always win, and that is not a flaw. It is part of what keeps the sport honest.

What keeps me writing is the tension between football’s soul and its economics. The game began as something deeply working-class, played in the mud by miners and factory workers. It is now a global entertainment industry worth hundreds of billions. That tension plays out every week.

And yet even now, with xG, progressive passes, pressing intensity, and expected threat, the game still escapes full quantification. Stats cannot measure the goalkeeper who organizes his defense with voice and authority. They cannot capture the collective belief of a side that has no business winning but refuses to stop believing.

The numbers are the starting point, not the conclusion.

The goalkeeper’s perspective

I played goalkeeper for most of my life. It is a position that teaches you to read the game differently. You see everything in front of you, you are always thinking two moves ahead, and you learn quickly that intelligence beats physicality most of the time. The best goalkeepers I ever watched were not always the biggest or the most athletic. They were the ones who understood the game before it happened.

What I actually do

By day, I work in digital and tech. I build things. Ultrivia is my attempt to bring that mindset to football coverage by using real match data to write analysis that means something, and turning those same stats into quiz questions that test whether you were actually watching.

Every article on this site starts with the data and ends with a question: did the score tell the real story? Usually, it did not.

What the game taught me

Football taught me geography before school ever did. I spent years following European Cup campaigns wondering where exactly Monchengladbach was and whether Bayer was really a city in Bayer Leverkusen. It turns out Bayer is not a city at all. It is a pharmaceutical company, and the club was literally founded by factory workers from the Bayer chemical plant.

The World Cup did the same for world history. I was deep into following qualifiers when I first learned about El Salvador and Honduras, two countries that in 1969 went to war after tensions boiled over around a World Cup qualifying match. The Football War. Four days of conflict, thousands of casualties, and a reminder that football often sits on top of much larger forces.

Then there are tactics. I spent years obsessing over why some systems worked and others faded away. Why does nobody use the WM formation anymore, the elegant 3-2-2-3 shape Herbert Chapman built at Arsenal in the 1930s? Because the game evolved. Pressing, positional play, and fluid transitions made it obsolete. Tactics never exist in a vacuum. They are always a response to what the opposition is doing.

Clubs

CS Sedan Ardennes · AS Monaco · Toulouse FC · Olympique de Marseille

They say you can change your political party, you can change your wife, but you can never change the club you root for. I have done it a few times, and I am completely at peace with that. Loving the game that much, following it wherever it takes you, is not disloyalty. It is devotion.

Get in touch

Questions, feedback, or just want to argue about whether xG actually matters? Reach me at contact@5577media.com.