The National Team Rankings have been recalculated (this is the most I’ve ever recalculated these things in such a short time frame) and because of Germany’s impressive back to back wins over teams ranked just ahead of them, they’ve surged into fourth place. Now three of the final four teams are ranked in the top four (Spain and the Netherlands remain 2nd and 3rd respectively, same as pre-tournament). The rankings can be found here. (more…)

EDIT: A Minor Mathematical Error made the original numbers slightly off. These are no corrected. This error affected nothing until the “Knockout Stages post.” That’s what I get for trying to rush things. It has been caught now.

The National Team rankings have been updated again. They are here. Germany’s big result against the English also sees them jump past the English into the number five ranking. Ghana continues to make slow progress up the boards to number 36 and is now the lowest ranked team left in the tournament. (more…)

Here’s the new ratings including all games as of the end of the Group Stages (though not counting the just completed game between Uruguay and South Korea). The two biggest things to note here is Italy dropping out of the Top 10 and Argentina edging past England into fourth place. (more…)

In about an hour I’ll have the probabilities up for the remainder of the tournament. No more sims, I can solve everything directly from here on out now. I’ll also list the expected scores and percentages for each of the Round of 16 Matches.

I know that one will have started already, but it was the best I could do with the hardware failure.

A little teaser: 63% of the time, the ultimate winner is projected to be one of only three teams. The other 13 teams must share the remaining 37%.

Let’s get all the updated numbers out of the way first. The National Team Rankings have now been updated. An important note for these is that the numbers are capable of moving more at this time than any other point in a four year cycle. Not only do these games count more than any other in the system, but they are also the only inter confederation matches with a high importance rating (besides the final qualifiers). So not only can the ratings move for the teams playing, but teams not in the tournament can also move some depending on how well (or poorly) the teams from their region do. The only major change of note is that the North Koreans have now slipped behind New Zealand as the lowest rated side in the tournament. (more…)

Before getting into the sims, it’s worth pointing out the basics here. Because of the two draws, 5 points is a magic number now. A win and a draw in the next two games for any of the four teams in Group A puts them through to the knockout round. Considering the closeness in quality of the top three teams in the group and the host country being the other team, advancement of any kind by any method is probably something any would sign up for in a heartbeat.

Under Domenech, France has been a fairly low scoring team and this tends to cause a lot more draws than normal. This makes them a team that tends to be stronger in knockout rounds than in group stages since the winning team gets more than twice the value of a draw in the group stages. Theoretically Mexico have hurt themselves by only taking one point from the hosts, but hosting really is greatly beneficial for whatever the reason.

There’s very little change in the sim results, and most of it is within the range of random chance. However the 6% increase in the chances South Africa has to advance and the balance of the 6% decrease for Mexico probably is meaningful. Mexico’s expected points from this one was 1.78 while South Africa’s was 0.94. France’s was 1.46 and Uruguay’s was 1.24. So while South Africa only got a slightly greater number of points than expected, all three of their opponents got less with Mexico leading the bunch.

So obviously there will be bigger movement in the odds to come, but it’s nice to have the tournament finally here.