> limitations, principally the small number of tournaments available for validation and the risk of in-sample weight selection
But I agree this model is no more valuable than Paul the Octopus.
[1]yes, both of those are endogenous variables...
Seems weird to wait to run the "prospective" simulation until the World Cup is already in progress. Although it seems that the model also needs to use "the actual bracket and group-stage performance". So it's not prospective?
-- Egypt was robbed.
Since ancient times in Rome where they said "bread and games" are needed to keep the commoners happy, many generations of rulers had time to optimize large-scale sports events.
My personal theory is that these kind of extremely unfair decisions in football are a net benefit to stability of society, and there's no incentive for the leadership to aim for full fairness in sports.
Hear me out: When a team loses in unfair manner due to bad decisions of the referee, large masses of people feel the psychological pain of being robbed of a win. This feeling of "unfairness" makes the masses more resilient to experiencing "unfairness" in their day-to-day life, for example when a billionaire is not prosecuted in the same way than a common person.
If we turn the logic around and assume that football would always be perfectly fair, then the masses would demand the same kind of fairness also in their day-to-day lives. Obviously this demand for fairness is not aligned with an establishment class that wants to extract the maximum value possible from their citizens, and push as far as they can without risking stability of the country.
From an establishment perspective, it makes a lot of sense to condition the masses for "unfairness", and sports is the perfect way to do it. I'm not saying that the individual referees are paid off to let a certain country win, just that the establishment who runs each country (and thereby also run international sports organizations like FIFA) have no incentive to actually create total fairness.
This might also explain issues like the IOC re-instating russia for olympic games, even though they have not retreated from Ukrainian territory yet. It triggers people who strongly feel about morals and ethics, and it brings the point home that the world is unfair and it makes no sense to push for fairness in the greater context.
The benefit is psychological conditioning for people to accept unfairness.
edit: replaced "soccer" with "football"
Good models need a lot of data. Can you really be accurate with what, 30 data points, in which the team composition is basically reset each time?
In the average country players agree the bonus conditions with their Federation.
WEIGHTS = {
'w_xg': 0.09,
'w_goals': -0.07,
'w_star': 0.018,
'w_value': 0.18,
'w_rank': 0.4,
'w_def': -0.12,
'xga_share': 0.85,
'w_gk': 0.0042
}
$ python3 worldcup_model.py --sims 100000
2026 FIFA World Cup -- championship probabilities (100,000 simulations, from Round of 32)
1. England 11.7% *
2. France 10.0% *
3. Spain 9.3% *
4. Argentina 8.4%
5. Germany 8.1%
Get a few nice glamorshots and make sure you have something else in the queue before then to plug during the interviews.
Here's hoping they were right for England as well, but we'll find out soon enough.
It's FIFA World Cup - Fédération Internationale de Football Association. Football, not soccer.
They also missed a potentially tricky first knockout round tie against local rivals Uruguay because Uruguay underperformed and Cape Verde unexpectedly overperformed.
dwedge•2h ago