Here’s a great infographic featured in this month’s Wired UK. The infographic was created by Section Design from data by journalist Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski.
If you haven’t read it, I recommend Kuper and Szymanski’s Soccernomics. In the book they outline the basic theory used in this infographic, along with a bunch of other interesting topics such as game theory as it pertains to penalty kicks.
One thing I noted when looking at this graphic is how they briefly mention that the formula they use rarely predicts a draw. This is an important caveat, because draws are fairly common in soccer. So in the group stages in this graphic, each group has a team with 3 wins, 2 wins, 1 win, and 0 wins. This might simplify things for their calculations, but it does not reflect reality, where there will surely be draw games during the group stage. We won’t see every group end up with a point spread of 9, 6, 3, and 0. We’ll see teams with 4 or 5 points who move on, we’ll probably see some groups where there are ties in points and one team moves on due to goal differential.
This treatment of the group games is responsible for what I think is the strangest part of this whole graphic: Serbia in the final. The graphic shows Serbia winning their group, which places them on the path shown to reach the final. I think Germany will likely win that group, which mean that Germany and Serbia would switch during the knockout stages. Whether Germany makes the final or not is a different story though.
But I’m just going with my gut and conventional wisdom, these guys have a lot of data to back up their claims, so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how close they are in the end.
Some other boffins sorting things out:
