A scientist from Oxford has made a prediction on the outcome of the World Cup. To do this, he supplied a model with game data for the teams.
An Oxford mathematician thinks he knows who will win the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Joshua Boll got data from past World Cups and about the participating teams and players. He then fed this into a mathematical model he had developed. His prediction: England will be knocked out in the quarter-finals, Argentina and Brazil will meet in the semi-finals. The South Americans will win the final between Brazil and Belgium.
And Germany? According to the Brit’s calculations, Hansi Flick’s team will still make it into the round of 16, but will be beaten there by Belgium. For France it should be enough to reach the quarterfinals.
Expert has already won the Fantasy Premier League
Boll points out on Twitter that his model is a prediction of who is most likely to win the World Cup. Statistically, however, it is less concrete and one of many possible scenarios. He ran his data through multiple simulations, a total of 100,000 times. Brazil won 14 percent of the runs. In his model, he took into account, among other things, how close a team is to the goal and how often they have scored in the past.
The scientist is not completely uninformed when it comes to football. Two years ago he competed in and won the British Fantasy Premier League. In the competition, the more than eight million participants put together a virtual team of Premier League players. Points are then awarded based on the performance of those players in the real league. Boll works at the Mathematics Institute at the University of Oxford, holds a PhD and works on mathematical models in cancer research.
At the 2010 World Cup, an octopus named Paul correctly predicted who would be the winner. However, the octopus in Oberhausen used his intuition rather than a mathematical model. Paul picked the winning team correctly in four of the six games at Euro 2008 and in all seven games at the 2010 World Cup with Germany. He also predicted Spain as World Cup winners.