

England to win World Cup, says JPM quant model - nsoonhui
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2010/05/18/233991/england-to-win-world-cup-says-jpm-quant-model/

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nir
Readers from non-soccer nations: every 4 years there's a soccer world cup. A
few months before every soccer world cup, UK media is abuzz with predictions
that, this time, England will really go all the way.

In the world cup itself, the English barely manages to graduate the group
stage when, bruised and battered, it meets a Latin American or stronger
European team that promptly wipes the floor with them in the next round.

A band of heros only few weeks ago, they then return to England to have the UK
tabloids wipe the floor with them once again.

That's a soccer tradition many of us look forward to seeing again next month,
in South Africa.

~~~
megablast
England has great players, possibly the strongest side altogether. However,
they never manage to play together as a team, unlike a lot of other countries.

This result is good news, now I don't have to watch any of the world cup.
Rather watch sports where cheating is not such an integral part of the game,
and where the officiating body actually tried to discourage it rather than
encourage. (from a bitter aussie)

~~~
patrickk
Last World Cup England's "great players" like Frank Lampard and Stevie Gerrard
never turned up. Their only consistently good players in that tournament were
a guy who used to ply his trade in Germany (Owen Hargreaves) and Wayne Rooney
of course (yes I'm a Man Utd. fan). Manchester United bought Hargreaves as a
result of that showing.

The media has hyped a lot of England's "stars" into the stratosphere so that a
lot of people believe the rubbish that's published about them. Every time the
World Cup rolls around all England have to do is show up and they'll win it.
And when they don't it's the end of the world. Just cos you invented the
sport, doesn't mean you have a divine right to win it! In Europe, I would
admire the likes of Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands a lot more than
England as they have a lot of fine, natural footballers (not to mention they
generally play better as a unit) and I'd suspect one or two of the should
reach the semis at least.

ps. I hope France get annihilated in the group stages. Yes, I'm Irish. Those
rotten cheaters should never have been permitted to get on a plane to South
Africa. Even if you're French you shouldn't support your own country. C'mon
Mexico!

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joubert
My money is on Nate Silver's prediction of Brazil winning, with Spain in 2nd
and England 3rd.

Full rankings (updated periodically):
[http://soccernet.espn.go.com/spi/rankings/_/view/worldcup?cc...](http://soccernet.espn.go.com/spi/rankings/_/view/worldcup?cc=5901&ver=us)

Methodology: [http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-
cup/story/_/id/4447078/ce...](http://soccernet.espn.go.com/world-
cup/story/_/id/4447078/ce/us/guide-espn-spi-ratings?cc=5901&ver=us)

~~~
zzygan
I think rankings in general are pretty useless overall.

Every single World Cup in the past has turned up surprises in the weirdest
kind of way.

My opinion is Spain 1st, Brazil 2nd, Ivory Coast 3rd

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rglullis
Every world cup we see predictions like that. Every world cup these
predictions are wrong.

The beautiful thing about football (and maybe the reason it is not that
popular in the US) is that stats don't matter nearly as much as they do in
baseball, american football and basketball.

~~~
btmorex
Just curious: what evidence is there that the stats matter less?

There are certainly fewer stats altogether and the stats that exist are more
team-oriented stats, but I still don't really buy your conclusion.

For a counterpoint, baseball is pretty much the king of sports in terms of
statistics and it's still pretty damn hard to predict a world series winner at
the end of the regular season, much less at the beginning of the season.

~~~
jdrock
Soccer should be much harder to quantify with stats because the game is
basically a set of two continuous events.

As a contrast, baseball is easier to quantify with stats because it's a series
of discrete events.

In most sports statistical analysis, you try and drill down to a discrete
event. In baseball, it's something like at-bat or on-base. In basketball, it's
per-possession (though this isn't enough). But in soccer, what can you do?
Per-possession is difficult because it overlooks the 21 other players on the
field. Everything is team-oriented.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Baseball is even _better_ than that. It's a bunch of discrete events that are
built out of many, many nigh-identical repetitions of even _smaller_ discrete
events.

The other point to make is that baseball controls the combinatorial explosion
by either having the players act in relative isolation (when fielders handle
the ball) or by grouping them in tiny groups of two or three (pitcher, batter,
and to some extent the catcher), one of whom is generally a constant in any
given game (the catcher), and one of whom only changes a few times per game
(the pitcher). This is a fairly restricted set of possible matchups, and these
are replayed over and over to get better stats. That's why baseball is the
statistician's dream.

Similarly, in basketball there are fairly few players on the floor, and they
tend to match up with each other fairly predictably. And while American
football puts 22 players on the field, most of them never touch the ball, and
most of the remaining players do the same sort of job over and over in the
same relatively small part of the field, interacting with the same small
subset of players on the other team.

But soccer is all over the place. ;)

~~~
patrickk
In a top-class soccer match, you can't take your eyes off the action or you
will miss something crucial. You could probably doze off for 20 minutes and
miss little in a baseball game. Each to their own.

Just because you don't understand soccer isn't reason alone to describe it as
"all over the place". It's a very exciting team sport (when played properly)
and full of formations and tactics that coaches constantly try to innovate
with:

The classic 4-4-2 formation

Beckenbauer's/Dutch football's 4-3-3

Jose Murinho's 4-5-1...Google em!

Also:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_(football)#Common_mod...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_\(football\)#Common_modern_formations)

~~~
mechanical_fish
You appear to have misinterpreted my sentence as some sort of insult. There's
nothing wrong with being "all over the place"! No two minutes of soccer are
exactly alike, but that is scarcely a bad thing!

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javanix
Mortgage-backed securities to stay profitable, says Merill-Lynch quant model.

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johnrob
There's not nearly enough data to make decent conclusions about national
teams. They don't play often enough, and when they do the rosters are never
the same. To make a decent prediction you have to use the final roster
(submitted to FIFA) and factor in each player's condition.

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JangoSteve
There was actually an analysis done a while back of the outcomes of every game
in the last world-cup that showed statistically just how unpredictable soccer
games are. The punchline is that soccer is very unpredictable, especially
given the bracket setup of the World Cup.

I can't seem to track down the article now, but I sort of remember the
logic...

If Team A beats Team B, then Team B beats Team C, then Team C beats Team A,
then you've demonstrated at least a 33% probability of a fluke outcome in the
soccer bracket. This is highly simplified of course, but repeat this analysis
over a much larger sample size, and you get some pretty convincing results
(and I really wish I could find that paper now).

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tokenadult
A fascinating book to read as the World Cup nears:

[http://www.amazon.com/Soccernomics-Australia-Turkey-Iraq-
Are...](http://www.amazon.com/Soccernomics-Australia-Turkey-Iraq-Are-
Destined/dp/1568584253)

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steveplace
"Black swans" occur quite often in sports, so statistical modeling only goes
so far. One torn ACL is all it takes and it can change models around.

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SkyMarshal
These guys predict Brazil vs Serbia in the final, w/ Brazil winning. Based on
GDP, population, & other demographics.

[http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/infographical-
mor...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/infographical-morsels-7/)

