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Russia World Cup 2018 Prediction Model.

Opta’s World Cup Predictor has been built using Opta’s huge database of past International and World Cup Finals matches.

Building of the model

Each team given an attacking and defensive strength calculated on the basis of their past performances. With these attacking and defensive strengths – and other World Cup particular variables– for each match we can set a odds to every possible result (either team to win or a draw). If Team A were playing Team B: the possibility of Team A win may be 20%, a draw 30% and a Team B win 50%. From these probabilities we can simulate the whole tournament. When we finish simulating the tournament enough times, we can imply the possibility of any team to win the World Cup or reach a particular stage of the tournament.

How to decide the attacking & defensive strength of a team?

The attacking and defensive strengths are on the basis of all official results from the four years before the World Cup. This also includes all World Cup qualifiers, confederation championships, confederation championship qualifiers, friendlies and the FIFA Confederations Cup. Additionally, these strengths are based on results at the previous two World Cups (2010 and 2014).

What are the others World Cup specific variables considered?

Based on historical World Cup results we have calculated the effects of several additional factors. We include two “home advantages”: one for the host nation and another for all the teams from the host confederation (in this case UEFA). We also include an advantage for teams that have won a World Cup since 1970, this serves as a proxy for teams that have World Cup winning pedigree.

Anything that model misses?

This model does not include any player based information because we don’t know the squads for the tournament yet. If Messi get injured tomorrow Argentina’s chances of winning the World Cup would reduce  remarkably but the model wouldn’t internalise this until Argentina start playing more matches and suffer as a result of Messi being injured.