Egnatia Rrogozhinë and Lillestrom served up a goalless stalemate in this UEFA Europa League knockout tie, cancelling out our model's lean toward a Lillestrom win and a more open scoreline. With elimination pressure bearing down on both sides, neither team could find the breakthrough—a result our model had assigned only a 27% probability to beforehand.

Coming into the match, our model favoured a 1-2 scoreline in Lillestrom's favour, built on Egnatia's mixed recent form and defensive vulnerabilities despite their high-scoring home record, set against Lillestrom's underlying statistical performance on expected goals despite their patchy results. The expectation was for intensity and attacking intent from both squads, with both teams likely to register. Instead, the match stayed locked at 0-0, a tighter outcome than the model had anticipated. Neither side managed to convert their chances into goals, which flipped the script on what looked like a recipe for goals.

This is a clean miss for our model—we called the direction wrong and missed the exact score entirely. In knockout football, a goalless draw keeps everything alive for the return leg, but it wasn't the scenario we'd weighted most heavily. The factors we'd flagged pre-kickoff didn't translate into the attacking game the model had expected, a reminder that even when the underlying logic holds, execution on the pitch doesn't always follow the numbers.