Topend Sports

World Cup Predictions

We all have a favorite team and an idea of who we think will win the World Cup, but these are mostly subjective opinions. There are also some who use scientific methods to come up with a more objective opinion of who will win, with varying success. No one predicted France would win the 2018 World Cup, it was Brazil, Germany and Spain that were favorites. We have started listing predictions for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, though most will come out in the months leading up to the event. We have also collated predictions from previous World Cups, in and 2010, 2014 and 2018 where you can read the predictions and see how they compared to the actual results.



Methods

The predictions use various methods, such as analyzing bookmaker odds and using recent results and rankings. The predictions can also be a result-based model which models directly the probability of a game outcome (win, loss or draw), compared to a score-based model, which focusses on the match score. The match score model better suits a tournament lie the FIFA World Cup as the game scores are important in the group stage to determine which teams progress. Many of them using Monte Carlo simulations, which means that they simulate the tournament thousands of times, and the probability that a team wins the tournament represents the share of simulations in which it wins it.

Paul the Octopus makes a predictionPaul the Octopus makes a World Cup prediction

Other References



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FIFA World Cup Extra

The current men's World Cup is being held in Qatar 2022, the next women's world cup will be in Australia/New Zealand 2023. See more firsts and other trivia, a quiz, and also information about each country at the World Cup. Most importantly, who are the winners?

Major Events Extra

The largest sporting event in the world is the Olympic Games, but there are many other multi-sport games. In terms of single sport events, nothing beats the FIFA World Cup. To see what's coming up, check out the calendar of major sporting events.

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