“Who will win the World Cup?”
The question is often asked as if a true football insider or statistical whizz should know, but in fact it’s unanswerable. The current favourites, France and Spain, could easily trip up. A football World Cup is one of the most unpredictable events in sport. All anyone can do is indicate certain predictive patterns.
More than most sports, football favours the underdog. A study by Eli Ben-Naim of Los Alamos National Laboratory and other physicists in 2006 analysed over a century’s worth of match results, and found that in English football the underdog won 45 per cent of the time, compared with about 36 per cent in basketball and American gridiron football. The main reason is the scarcity of goals in soccer. A weak team can defend all match, get lucky once and win, whereas in other ballgames there are so many attacks that stronger teams can compensate for a random setback.