Predict the team to win the 2014 World Cup with science

Only a few days left, the 2014 World Cup will officially open. You definitely have a favorite team, but if you look at the most scientific way, who will be the world cup of 2014?

>>> What's the 2014 World Cup ball?

Starting from June 12, the most important event of the year for millions of ball fans will be officially kicked off. The 2014 World Cup will bring a familiar atmosphere every 4 years: cafes crowded with fans, dark eyes because of the night watching the top match and of course the screens excited to celebrate.

Even fans of "under- the-table " teams like England, Japan or the United States will also hopefully hope that their darling team can make a big surprise this year when beating big boys. But, the 2014 World Cup will have only one champion. Which team will stand on the glory of the world's largest football festival?

Who will be the champion of the 2014 World Cup?

Goldman Sachs financial company conducted very, very many statistics to calculate the championship ability of 32 teams attending the 2014 World Cup. According to these statistics, the home team Brazil has the ability to win the largest with a score of 48.5%, 5 times higher than the 9.8% of the Spanish champions.

So, what is the basis for the world's No. 1 financial company to give this number? The answer is an extremely scientific prediction method, with the only input being historical data, eliminating all of the human conjecture factors:

"The prediction for each match is based on a regression analysis , using the entire history of official international matches (ie excluding friendly matches) since 1960. This helps them I obtained 14,000 observations to estimate the coefficients for my model. The dependent variable in the above regression analysis is the number of goals for each participant in each match. We hypothesize that the number of goals for each team in each specific game will be based on Poisson distribution ".

In this ranking, Brazil is clearly the most favored name, with a score of five times the reigning champion of the World Cup and Eurocup - Spain. Teams like Cameroon, Japan and Honduras should probably practice accepting defeat now, if Goldman's prediction is correct. In fact, the odds at bookmakers also favor Brazil, but the difference is not " as shocking" as Goldman's numbers.

He, the favorite team of many fans in Vietnam, will also be difficult to overcome the group stage this year. Even the Three Lions may not have achieved any victory when they have to face a heavy rival Costa Rica.

The following is the result (conjecture) of the knockout stages based on Goldman Sachs' prediction. Brazil and Argentina will reach the final, and the teams of Neymar and Silva will win the World Cup for the first time after 12 years of waiting.

It should be clear that the results of Goldman Sachs's prediction have a lot of guesses, in which past results are clearly more important than the current potential of the teams. Therefore, potential young teams like Belgium still rank relatively low in Goldman's results table. Before you criticize this ranking, understand Goldman's analytical method:

"Our model does not use any information about the quality of the squad or the independent players outside the results of the team. For example, we will not consider the event of a player. Important new injuries on the predicted results.

This is a completely statistical prediction, human judgment has no role at all . "

The 2014 World Cup marks the first time Goldman has made fully scientific predictions. Earlier, the bank had surmised the list of four teams that would be participating in the semi-finals. In 2006 and 2010, Goldman correctly predicted two of the four teams that reached the last two rounds. But, in the 2002 World Cup in Korea and the Netherlands, all 4 Goldman predictions were wrong !?

Goldman Sachs customers also contributed to predicting World Cup results: the financial company chose a "Dream Team" of the 2014 World Cup. Surprisingly, both Luis Suarez (Liverpool) and Yaya Toure (Manchester City) did not make a name on this list despite a big mark in the Premier League.