World Cup Analysis

World Cup 2018 start soon and you might have heard about @blocktrades’ prize of 2000 SBD if you guess the most right results. I don’t know much about soccer but I know quite a lot about data analysis and if you want to win, this analysis might help you. If you didn't join so far, here is article describing how to do that.

Wisdom of the crowd

Collective opinion of a lot of people will often produce better result than an opinion of a single expert because false expectations of a single person are filtered by voice of others that have the right information. Let’s look at some examples: most people agree that Spain, France and Brazil will win all their matches, most people also agree that Saudi Arabia and Iran will lose all. 96 % of people think that Spain will beat Morocco and 95 % think that Spain wins over Iran. Only 2 % of people think that Costa Rica will beat Brazil which is extremely unlikely and since you get only 1 point if that happens, you should prefer to bet on more likely results where you can get the same 1 point much more likely. The hardest think to find in the data is separating teams that are on similar level like Serbia and Switzerland, Poland and Colombia or Japan with 39 % chance of win and Senegal with 33 % chance of win while 28 % likelihood of tie. We can do some tricks like removing people what believe that Costa Rica wins over Brazil but even that moves the percentages only slightly.

Looking at the data

We analyzed 954 valid entries and most people (913) agreed that Spain beats Morocco (24 believe in tie), 906 people think Spain will win over Iran while 24 people believe in Spain's loss and 24 in tie), 892 trusts Brazil to win over Switzerland while 25 think Brazil will lose and 37 think it will end up with a tie. Win and loss in graph is from a view point of the first mentioned team.

Spain vs Morroco	Iran vs Spain	Brazil vs Switzerland
913 - 17 (24 ties)	24 - 906 (24 ties)	892 - 25 (37 ties)

Mexico vs Sweden	Poland vs Colombia	Serbia vs Switzerland
396 - 243 (315 ties)	182 - 438 (334 ties)	291 - 353 (310 ties)

Change when we eliminate noise

When we eliminate people that believe Brazil will lose to Costa Rica, Spain will lose to Morocco and similar matches that most people agree on with each iteration we get only slight change in percentage distribution of wins and loses as you can see down below.

Sweden's chances agains South Korea slightly rises when we eliminate users with marginal views. Sweden's chance rises from 59% to 63% and South Korea's chance decreases from 16% to 13%.

Denmark vs Australia	Japan vs Senegal	Russia vs Saudi Arabia
50% -> 54% vs 33% -> 31%	39% -> 37% vs 28% -> 29%	88% -> 91% vs 7% -> 6%

Win probability	Team		Team	Win probability	Tie probability
88%	Russia	vs	Saudi Arabia	5%	7%
10%	Egypt	vs	Uruguay	74%	15%
47%	Morocco	vs	Iran	23%	30%
20%	Portugal	vs	Spain	51%	29%
94%	France	vs	Australia	3%	3%
90%	Argentina	vs	Iceland	4%	6%
21%	Peru	vs	Denmark	49%	31%
57%	Croatia	vs	Nigeria	22%	21%
36%	Costa Rica	vs	Serbia	37%	27%
91%	Germany	vs	Mexico	4%	5%
94%	Brazil	vs	Switzerland	3%	4%
59%	Sweden	vs	South Korea	16%	24%
90%	Belgium	vs	Panama	4%	6%
4%	Tunisia	vs	England	90%	6%
58%	Poland	vs	Senegal	18%	24%
68%	Colombia	vs	Japan	16%	16%
55%	Russia	vs	Egypt	19%	27%
92%	Portugal	vs	Morocco	3%	5%
90%	Uruguay	vs	Saudi Arabia	4%	6%
3%	Iran	vs	Spain	95%	3%
87%	France	vs	Peru	4%	9%
50%	Denmark	vs	Australia	17%	33%
72%	Argentina	vs	Croatia	8%	20%
92%	Brazil	vs	Costa Rica	2%	7%
45%	Nigeria	vs	Iceland	29%	26%
19%	Serbia	vs	Switzerland	46%	35%
86%	Belgium	vs	Tunisia	6%	8%
90%	Germany	vs	Sweden	3%	7%
15%	South Korea	vs	Mexico	65%	20%
91%	England	vs	Panama	4%	5%
39%	Japan	vs	Senegal	33%	28%
31%	Poland	vs	Colombia	37%	32%
52%	Uruguay	vs	Russia	20%	28%
14%	Saudi Arabia	vs	Egypt	65%	21%
96%	Spain	vs	Morocco	2%	3%
3%	Iran	vs	Portugal	93%	4%
8%	Denmark	vs	France	73%	19%
34%	Australia	vs	Peru	42%	24%
6%	Nigeria	vs	Argentina	80%	14%
17%	Iceland	vs	Croatia	60%	23%
5%	South Korea	vs	Germany	92%	3%
42%	Mexico	vs	Sweden	25%	33%
2%	Sebria	vs	Brazil	92%	6%
55%	Switzerland	vs	Costa Rica	20%	25%
23%	Japan	vs	Poland	56%	21%
18%	Senegal	vs	Colombia	60%	23%
39%	England	vs	Belgium	30%	31%
28%	Panama	vs	Tunisia	43%	29%

My recommendation

Choose winning team according to table above that is highlighted i.e. more than 40% of people agree that the team wins (W) and if no team has above 40%, I recommend to choose a tie (T).

About problems with the data

We didn’t analyze data in other languages or with typos. We ignored if someone specified that Japan vs Poland will end up with win of Japan and tie of Poland. If you missed some matches or duplicated matches, your entry was ignored as well.

Coming soon

After the first stage, expect analysis of posts for the second stage of the World Cup.