by a Thinker, Sailor, Blogger, Irreverent Guy from Madras

Semi Final lineup in FIFA World Cup 2014 Brazil


After a couple of more days of tweaking, the FIFA World Cup 2014 Brazil Winner Prediction with MS Excel was truly ready, more soothing to the eye, and easily explainable.  So I thought of running it on the 2010 World Cup, for which we have all the results.  The results were surprising.  Though not 100% correct, it failed to predict the winner in only 4 out of the 16 matches, starting from the Round of 16.  More on that later.  First, Let us look at the 2014 FIFA World Cup Finals at Brazil.

Plotting the results of the Group stages, and the Round of 16 gives us the predicted results for the Quarter Finals starting a few hours from now.  The MS Excel FIFA World Cup 2014 Predictor is more readable in this version.  The most important or relevant columns are ‘A’ and ‘N’.  You should also start from the bottom of the spreadsheet (image), in this case Row 39.

fifa-world-cup-2014-brazil-winner-predictor

The Round of 16 results have been entered in the respective cells in Rows 24 to 39.  The Column ‘A’ ranks the Team based on the Group Stage matches.  As we can see, the stronger of the two teams in every particular match has won.

The spreadsheet then calculates the performance (based on a mangled form of formula used for American Baseball, as explained before), in the ‘Index’ column, ranks it and the results are sorted in ascending order in Columns ‘M’ and ‘N’.

The respective ranks are transposed in the column ‘A' of the Rows 13 to 20 which is the Quarter Final table.  As per this prediction:
  • France (1) is a sure fire winner against Germany (2) - Index of 91 vs. 52;
  • Netherlands (3) is a definite winner against Costa Rica (6) - Index of 34 vs. 21;
  • Brazil (8) is in touch with Columbia (7) - Index of 18 vs. 21;
  • Argentina (5) is evenly matched (literally) with Belgium (4) - Index of 31.170 vs. 31.446.
Here is the same MS Excel based FIFA World Cup 2014 Brazil predictor with the results of the 2010 Finals at South Africa.  The 4 results which did not go as per the formula are highlighted ‘Orange’ in Column ‘A’.
  • Spain upset the calculations in 2 matches - one in the Round of 16 beating Portugal, and next in the Semi Finals, defeating Germany.  
  • Ghana upset the calculation in 1 matches - in the Round of 16 winning against USA.
  • Netherlands upset Brazil in the Quarter Finals.
fifa-world-cup-2010-south-africa-winner-predictor

The formula has been explained before, and the following adjustments are only to be explained. 
  • Where the Goal Difference or Points Scored is ‘0’, they have been discarded (in formula, replaced with ‘1’).
  • A penalty shoot-out is given 0.5 goal difference, added to the original score line.  If it was 1-1 (5-3), the Goal Difference is calculated as 1.5-0.5.
Let us see whether the formula holds up, or I end up with eggs on my face.
;-)
Cheers and Ole!


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