quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Fret not, Marcus. It's not been a good World Cup for predictions. I was suggesting Uruguay could have a deep run a couple of weeks ago.

I definitely did not imagine Cape Verde would face Argentina, like, ever And, because I was supposed to be working, of course I'm here instead:

Even under ordinary circumstances, I mean. A model worth using for financial risks, from what I've seen, would need to have an accuracy rate north of 90%, a nearly clairvoyant status, due to how hard misses affect the overall profit rate. My model is a wee bit short of that when there is a winner, which is not always the case because you can't just keep the players running indefinitely in the scorching heat until someone scores. I mean, you can, but don't let Infantino have any funny ideas. I just thought I'd add that caveat because I'm doing this out of the sheer curiosity and smartarsery that come with my job description, rather than an attempt to get some serious coin

Now, my model is doing roughly as well as bookmakers (~62% success rate). Draws keep tripping it (whenever the teams didn't draw, my model picked the right side 85% of the time) because roughly a quarter of matches end in a draw, but you can't know ahead which ones due to the low-scoring nature of the game. I tried adding rules, but they always decreased the success rate.

As for the predictions:

Interesting fact about the knock-out stage: on average, the round of 16 used to be the least unpredictable round, as the runner-up of any given group upstaged the winner of another group only about once or twice per tournament — and the runner-up is usually a heavyweight who suffered an upset in the group stage (such as when Croatia beat Japan last time, or England beat Colombia in the previous cup). That's the round of 32 now, probably. Randomness kicks back in on the following round, as group winners (and those who were assumed to win their respective groups) start cannibalising each other.

Even then, it's not so random.

Five teams have reached the quarterfinals more often than they haven't this century (Brazil, Germany, Argentina, France, and England), and only one (the Netherlands) has been there exactly half the time. Croatia, like Spain, Portugal, and Belgium, are actually a tier below at 2 out of 6. Not one-offs though, by any definition.

That's surprisingly... regular, and the sole reason there aren't more outliers like Brazil (which managed to reach the quarterfinals every single time this century) is because of how bracketing works: either France or Germany won't make it this time; same for Spain or Portugal or Croatia. Given these patterns, it would be pretty safe to pick the Netherlands, France, Brazil, England, Belgium, your Iberian country of choice, Argentina, and a wildcard as the ones going all the way to the quarterfinals. It's the one time my model and I actually agree, now that South Korea are out and can't break any Belgian hearts

My model picks Spain as the Iberian country. I pick Portugal. We both pick Colombia as the newcomer. Let's see how well this holds

Edit: One flaw in my reasoning above. It may have sounded like these teams always advance to the knockout stage. That's not quite what I meant to say - the reason Germany haven't reached the quarterfinals every single time is because the group stage wasn't always kind to them, for example. Football isn't clockwork just yet.

Edit 2: Caught a few mistakes and corrected them. This is the unashamed result of procrastination and prone to errors

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Last edited by Lira on Jun-28-2026 at 19:49