World Cup 2014 Predictions and Results

http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/world-cup/

by danso • 12 years ago

46 37 12 years ago

pmoods• 12 years ago

This is awesome but the predictiveness is quite unpredictive. I guess that's what happens when you quant everything

david927• 12 years ago

Or it's what happens when you look at data in the simplest way possible. We know there will be upsets, we know some players play better together than others, etc. This could have been enriched to show something quite interesting.

On a side note, personally, I think England will surprise everyone by making it to the finals.

wismer• 12 years ago

I wish I could share your optimism about England.

TillE2• 12 years ago

You mean out of the group stage? That wouldn't be too much of a surprise; oddschecker.com has England and Uruguay about equally likely to qualify, with Italy a bit ahead. And if Luis Suarez isn't fully fit, England have every chance.

smackay• 12 years ago

and be beaten by Portugal, on penalties, no less.

napolux• 12 years ago

England will make it just like every other World Cup except 1966.

martijn_himself• 12 years ago

Nice visualisation but assumptions seem to be based on past performance in world cups. The Netherlands is supposed to have the 6th best defense in the competition, which is ludicrous.

toyg• 12 years ago

assumptions seem to be based on past performance in world cups

Not even that: England has a 35% chance of winning their match against Italy, which only has 33%. Overall stats in the competition are twice as good for Italy, as you can see at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-25233859

TillE2• 12 years ago

That's a whole lot of 1-0s in their "projection" of the knockout stages, and not a single game in the entire tournament where a team scores more than 2. Not at all realistic.

lazyant2• 12 years ago

Yes, goal average is about 2.5, very likely one of the weaker teams gets 3 or more against.

joosters4• 12 years ago

You're missing the point. They are showing the most likely scores. Take a look at the betting for any of the matches and you won't find the most likely correct score being 3+ for any side.

Of course, taking the entire set of games into account, there's likely to be some games with higher scores, but when you consider each game individually, as this web site does, the likely result will not have many goals.

soperj• 12 years ago

Then what is the point really? You could figure all this out by looking at the odds, which are probably more useful then this info-graphic.

TheCoelacanth• 12 years ago

This is the single most likely outcome, but this exact outcome is still very unlikely because of the sheer number of possible outcomes.

von_tenia• 12 years ago

Now I wonder if an octopus would be more reliable this time.

vide0star• 12 years ago

Favorites win every game! Try doing your March Madness basketball bracket like that and you will not get very far. Saying the 1st and 2nd seed teams will be in the final is not a reasonable prediction.

grahamel2• 12 years ago

But that's how predictions go, same as the betting odds.

It doesn't mean a lesser team can't win or a bigger team not loosing all their group games (as France did one time)

corin_• 12 years ago

It's possible you're thinking of a previous event I've forgotten, but presuming you're referring to South Africa four years ago, France actually lost 2 and drew 1 - sorry for pedantry :)

tedsanders2• 12 years ago

No upsets is much more likely than any other prediction. Just because you know there will be upsets doesn't mean you know which specific upsets will occur. In fact, it's probably more likely that no upsets occur than one specific set of upsets occur. It's only because there so many ways for upsets to occur (think about combinatorics/entropy), that you're virtually guaranteed to get an upset.

If you're driving down the street, do you think you're more likely to see an ordered license plate (123456) or an unordered license plate (163542)? Obviously unordered plates are more common. But if I ask: are you more likely to see the specific plate 123456 or the specific plate 163542, they are equally likely (even though the second plate has more 'apparent' randomness).

wslh• 12 years ago

I wonder if they analyzed the Messi factor correctly against Spain...

1781• 12 years ago

To go an entire World Cup without conceding a goal is unprecedented, and I would expect the probabilities to reflect this. I seems that the probabilities are calculated independently.

joosters4• 12 years ago

They aren't claiming that. The page is just showing the most likely outcome for each individual game.

xedarius• 12 years ago

Wonder if the host advantage is taken into account (not that Brazil need any kind of advantage).

As last time France hosted the world cup they won, yet they were not the best team in the tournament.

phreeza2• 12 years ago

I have a similar model for league matches, and the home advantage usually works out to something like 0.1 goals per match. It's important in estimating the odds, but rarely tips the balance with respect to who the most likely winner is.

lazyant2• 12 years ago

"Soccernomics" claims iirc that the home stadium (not exactly the same as home country) advantage is a full 1 goal

hokkos• 12 years ago

Why they were not the best team as they won the Euro just after that ?

thanatropism• 12 years ago

Nahhh.

This would be my prediction if the WC was a long series of randomly defined games. The specific games calendar has effects, though.

My own model goes from the Elo ratings at http://eloratings.net (with Elo, a pair of scores gives you an expected result) and simulates 10^7 World Cups, updating scores for each simulation as it goes and so on.

There aren't any clear favorites, although of course there's an elite group (IIRC 5 or 6 teams together have 25% of likelihood of being champions) and Germany is slightly ahead. But in the modal scenario Brazil is eliminated by Spain in the eighth-finals.

phreeza2• 12 years ago

Not sure updating the Elo ratings throughout the simulation is a good idea. The rating should reflect the 'optimal' estimate given the current information. A simulated result is not actually new information.

pms• 12 years ago

It's funny to see all scores being 0-0, 1-0, or 2-0... ;)

gnagatomo• 12 years ago

Brazilian here. The brazilian politics already bought the World Cup. It's 100% chance for Brazil to win. Mark my words and make some bets.

kafkaesque• 12 years ago

This would be more interesting if people made and posted their own predictions, which this graph lets you do!

aubergene• 12 years ago

Hey, one of the Bloomberg developers here. Thanks for the comments.

The prominent most likely score is a bit confusing, if you click through to the match detail then the histogram shows a range of goal differences. So for the first match we predict a goal difference of >2 to Brazil, although the highest probability for an actual score result is 2-0 (16%). Our model makes projections for up to 8-0 in both directions, but we aggregate them for display in this interactive.

World Cup 2014 Predictions and Results

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