From “taking it one game at a time” to actual insight — an AI is now keeping score on what managers say when the world is watching.
Football has spent years obsessing over what happens on the pitch. Sinch wants to know what happens at the microphone.
The communications platform, which powers more than 900 billion customer interactions annually, has launched the xC Tracker — an AI-powered tool that analyses every pre- and post-match press conference delivered by all 48 national team managers at this summer’s tournament, and ranks them by how often they reach for football’s most familiar phrases rather than saying something worth hearing.
The name is deliberate. Where xG measures the probability of a shot becoming a goal, xC — expected clichés — measures the probability of a manager telling you the team “gave 110 percent” or that there are “no easy games at this level.” A high xC score is not a compliment.
The tracker monitors communication patterns across six languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Arabic — and follows each manager from the opening match through to the final. It tracks how scores shift after wins and losses, whether pressure makes managers more or less predictable, and which coach will ultimately be crowned the winner of what Sinch is calling soccer’s Press Conference Ballon d’Or.
“Soccer gave us xG. We thought it was time someone measured xC,” said Robert Gerstmann, Chief Evangelist and Co-Founder of Sinch. “Anyone who has watched a post-match interview knows that certain phrases come up again and again. At Sinch, we help businesses communicate effectively under pressure every day. We wanted to find out whether soccer managers do too.”
The premise is more pointed than it sounds. Sinch’s core business is helping companies deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment — at scale, under pressure, across languages. The xC Tracker is an application of that same expertise to one of the most-watched, most-analyzed, and most linguistically predictable stages in global sport.
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Whether a manager is facing questions after a last-minute winner or a group-stage exit, the challenge is the same as every brand faces in a crisis: say something real, or say something safe. The tracker will tell you, in real time, which way each of the 48 went.
Live rankings and real-time data are available throughout the tournament at expectedclichetracker.com.