World Cup 2010: The End of the Line!

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Voros

Well there’s 63 games played and only one left to go. One team will collect it’s first ever World Cup, sending one of the two football mad countries into delirium and making National Heroes out of 23 players.

The National Team Rankings have been updated. They can be found here.

And here’s the basics for the final game.

Team       Goals   CHAMP%
Spain        1.1   56.27%
Netherlands  0.9   43.73%

Spain favored but the Dutch certainly have a fighting chance.

Rather than pontificate now, I’ll wait until the final game is over to start reviewing things.

It’s amazing that by this time tomorrow, all of these probabilities I’ve been running will now be either 0% or 100%.

But then 2014 is not that far away, and I think maybe I’ll take a stab at the Euros as well. Maybe even look at some club action for the first time. We’ll see.

8 responses to “World Cup 2010: The End of the Line!”

  1. Yair Avatar
    Yair

    Euros and Clubs (Euro Champions League perhaps?) pretty please. (!)

    It is a big challenge. Soccer is probably the least statistically analyzed of the big sports. It is very subtle and that makes it very difficult I think.

    Reply
  2. Amir Avatar
    Amir

    It will be interesting to see another set of simulations of the World Cup with the new rankings after the final.

    Reply
  3. Keld Avatar
    Keld

    Well it will be a huge work to make a club ranking list and to take hand of f.ex. CL.
    But a simulation of the Euro 12 qual and/or other continental tournaments will be very appreciated.

    Reply
  4. scaryice Avatar
    scaryice

    First of all, thanks for all the work you’ve done throughout WCQ and the World Cup.

    I have a couple questions on how you do the simulations:

    What program do you use to do them? Is it Excel, or something else? I know how you take the ratings and determine the probabilities for each match, I downloaded the spreadsheet you posted here a while ago. But I’m talking about programming it to do 10,000 sims of a group, or of the final tournament. How do you do that?

    When you were doing WCQ, did you have to simulate each group/confederation separately, or could you just do all of them at once? If so, is it possible to set it up so that you can simulate the entire 2014 cycle at once (including all of the random draws, the qualifiers themselves, then the final competition?)

    Reply
  5. Voros Avatar
    Voros

    Well one problem with jumping right back onto the 2014 numbers is that we don’t even know how many teams will come from each Confed, and FIFA has said early 2011 for that announcement. Understandably, most Confeds aren’t finalizing their plans until then. I could, however, use the previous qualifying setup just for grins and see what it spits out.

    I generally just use Excel as it makes things easy on me. Excel has a few weaknesses, but they generally don’t come into play for this kind of stuff. And yes it is possible to set up the random draws and such. Just a matter of me putting everything together.

    Reply
  6. Amir Avatar
    Amir

    What about using the new rankings to simulate the 2010 WC all over again?

    Reply
  7. Axel Avatar
    Axel

    Thanks for all the stuff you provide, Voros!
    I’d second simulations of the EURO qualifiers, highly appreciated. 🙂

    Reply
  8. scaryice Avatar
    scaryice

    So how do you set up excel to simulate an entire tournament or group’s worth of matches?

    Reply

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