After the Olympics, the world's most famous sporting event will raise its curtain today at Quater. The FIFA 2022 will be kicked off with 32 teams, and the obvious question would be "Who will be the winner". Will it be Brazil, Netherlands, Spain, Argentina, France, England, Belgium, or any other dark horses?
If you remember in FIFA 2010, Paul the Octopus predicted all the winners of the matches that involved Germany and the final between Spain and the Netherlands with an accuracy of 100%.
Paul the Octopus made friends and enemies on his own due to the predictions he made. Now in 2022, the University of Oxford has come up with a mathematical model to predict the winner.
The following figure is its prediction from the round of 16s.
According to the Oxford model, Brazil is the ultimate winner. However, looking at the recent, it will be a surprise.
Further, after 1998 defending champions did not perform well in the world cup finals. So France to be in the semi-finals is something against recent data.
I personally do not believe that predictions can be made for sports concerning its outcome. If you do that, I believe that will be the end of sports. Sport is beautiful because of the extremely high uncertainty. One touch or one move or one wrong decision may change the cause of the game drastically. In 2002 FIFA saw a lot of such matches. Who would have expected the defending champion, France to be beaten by the African nation Senegal? Who would have thought France would be out of the world cup in the first round without any wins? Among all the surprises, South Korea made the headlines by reaching the Semifinals and becoming the giant killer of Poland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain.
Let the sport be a sport!
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