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Of course, there was a paper that came out about a year ago that basically said that of all the major sports, football was statistically the least predictable.
by demallien 16y ago
Of course, there was a paper that came out about a year ago that basically said that of all the major sports, football was statistically the least predictable. Basically this means that you need to change the formula used by the ELO rankings so that it is much flatter than the equation that Wolfram has chosen here. Once that has been done, the error bars on he predictions just sky-rocket.
To give a concrete example from this World Cup; Germany thrashed Australia in their first match, 4-0. Germany then went on to be beaten by Serbia in a closely fought match 1-0, and then Serbia was dominated by Australia in the last round of group matches, 2-1. Other groups have had the world champions - Italy, and runner-ups, France, knocked out of the competition in the group stages, yet none of the current models predicted that either. Makes their value quite dubious, in my opinion.
- smackfu 16y agoIt's interesting that football doesn't use series of games to try to cancel out some of the randomness. It works pretty well for other sports. If two teams go to seven games, you know they are pretty well matched. It also seems like the group stage doesn't do a good enough job of canceling out random chance. Too many ties mean that too many of the groups came down to who won the final games of the group.
- yalurker 16y agoKeep in mind, ties are sometimes strategic. Many games this world cup have seen teams playing very conservative/defensive because they were intentionally hoping for a tie. Side-note, the Champions League and Europa League (where the top teams from each European Country's pro league compete against each other) uses a two-game system, one home and one away. The winner is decided by the cumulative score of the two games.