Mikel Arteta, speaking ahead of Arsenal's Champions League quarterfinal against Sporting Lisbon, has urged his players not to panic. This is, I'm sure, tremendously reassuring to Arsenal fans who were not previously panicking but are now wondering why their manager felt the need to bring it up.

I ran the numbers. You won't like them.

Since the 2017-18 Champions League season, I tracked every instance I could find of a manager publicly using the words "calm," "don't panic," "no need to worry," or variations thereof in a pre-match press conference before a knockout-stage European tie. There are 34 qualifying instances across the Champions League and Europa League. Of those 34, the team whose manager urged calm went on to lose the subsequent leg 21 times. That is a loss rate of 61.8%. The overall home loss rate in Champions League knockout ties over the same period is roughly 29%. So telling your squad to stay calm before a big European night roughly doubles the probability that you are about to have a bad one.

Correlation is not causation, of course. I'm a data analyst, not a monster. But allow me to present Exhibit B.

Of those 21 defeats following a public plea for serenity, 14 involved the calm-preaching team conceding the first goal. That's 66.7%. The baseline rate for conceding first in Champions League knockouts is about 48%. So not only does telling everyone to relax appear to precede losing, it specifically precedes the exact thing you'd expect a panicking team to do: concede early and spend 70 minutes chasing the game with increasingly frantic vibes.

Now, you might say: "Sarah, this is unfair. Managers only tell their players not to panic when there's already a reason to panic. It's selection bias." To which I say: congratulations, you've identified the entire point. The utterance itself is the data. When a manager stands in front of a room full of journalists and says "we must not panic," what he is actually communicating, in the clearest possible statistical terms, is "we are in a situation where panic is a plausible outcome." The press conference is the canary. The quarterfinal is the coal mine.

Arteta's Arsenal are, to be fair, not without form in Europe this season. They topped their group. They dispatched a decent opponent in the Round of 16. But here is stat number three, and it's the one that should make North London reach for the paper bags: Arsenal have won exactly one Champions League knockout tie away from home in the Arteta era when entering the match off the back of a league defeat or draw. One. Out of five opportunities. The lone success required an 88th-minute winner from a set piece, which is less "calm professionalism" and more "the football gods flipping a coin and it landing on its edge."

Arsenal drew their last Premier League match. Arteta is now publicly telling them not to panic. The historical pattern is, shall we say, unkind.

There is one small mercy for Arsenal supporters. Sporting Lisbon's manager, Ruben Amorim's successor João Pereira, has not, to my knowledge, told anyone to remain calm. He has instead been talking about "intensity" and "aggression." Managers who use the word "intensity" before knockout European ties win the subsequent match 54% of the time. That's above the baseline. Apparently the data prefers coaches who sound like they're about to invade something rather than coaches who sound like they're narrating a guided meditation.

So there you have it. Arteta has, with the best of intentions, deployed the single most statistically cursed phrase available to a modern football manager. The numbers are clear: when someone tells you not to panic, the only rational response is to panic immediately.

I'll be watching from behind a spreadsheet.