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Asia finishes its group stages in a couple of days and Africa plays more matches in a week, but the rest of the world waits until August (South America until September). An important note: Iran plays an absolutely critical World Cup qualifier at South Korea in their final Group Stage match.

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This weekend qualifiers are over, so let’s see how everyone is faring going into the midweek matches. The full qualification chances for every team can be found here. The National Team Ratings can be found here.

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One of the best parts about making mistakes is it gives you opportunities for explanations. I’ve re-run the 10,000 simulations correcting the coding mistake which meant Scotland was always the 2nd place team in Group 9 in UEFA. So many of the changes in results are due to this adjustment. But some aren’t.

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Looking over my latest post (since removed since the numbers are a little wrong), something jumped out at me: of the 11 times the Netherlands didn’t win their group, they didn’t qualify from the playoffs a single time. This meant that either they had some really bad luck in those playoffs, or there was something […]

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A lot more matches were played this week and some teams are moving up and down from the qualification chances posted last time. I was amazed after running the sims that no one hit the 10,000 out of 10,000 mark (though I think if I ran it again one might). So at the moment South […]

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So we had a few more qualifiers played, some friendlies to help assess team strength and now its time to update from our last installment. To review, I simulate the remaining World Cup qualifiers based on the Statistical National Team rankings I do and then assess the qualification chances of the remaining teams. The full […]

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There are still 100 teams participating in World Cup qualifying, 31 one of which will join the hosts for the big show in South Africa in 2010. But who really still has a shot to go? And who really should already be making their hotel reservations? Which of the big guns are in trouble? Which […]

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Rank Country OFF Rating DEF Rating 1. Brazil 1.97 303.74 2. Spain 1.57 340.61 3. Argentina 1.80 247.19 4. Netherlands 1.49 295.77 5. England 1.59 248.67 6. France 1.41 279.39 7. Italy 1.38 268.03 8. Germany 1.87 191.00 9. Czech Republic 1.57 212.43 10. Portugal 1.46 204.98 11. Romania 1.33 218.92 12. Croatia 1.33 213.82 […]

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Here’s the list of the chances of qualifying based on the 10,000 simulations. Obviously no rounding was needed. Country Qualify% South Africa 100.00% Brazil 99.88% Australia 99.85% Paraguay 99.44% Japan 99.09% Spain 99.09% Netherlands 98.41% Argentina 98.34% Mexico 97.13% England 96.86% Korea Republic 95.59% USA 95.24% Germany 93.42% Italy 91.10% Iran 86.04% Côte d’Ivoire 79.29% […]

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One of the things that’s special about playing England in soccer is that you get to play a very good team whose press you can actually understand. In this particularly instance, a sans Landon Donovan U.S. team got easily handled 2-0 in New Wembley. In truth the game wasn’t as close as that scoreline. As […]

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