The FIFA World Cup is just a week away, and as anticipation builds, debates over who will lift the trophy are heating up — but researchers believe data may already be pointing to an answer.
From June 11, huge numbers of supporters will be travelling to the US, hoping to watch the expanded field of 48 nations battle it out for football’s biggest prize.
With Canada, Mexico and the US sharing hosting duties across a packed month of matches, the tournament is expected to deliver a festival atmosphere on a massive scale.
Of course, predictions are where things get most intense.
The team you back often shapes what you think will happen, and fans rarely agree when it comes to forecasting the champion.
Still, a group of researchers has produced its own ranking of the teams most likely to win the World Cup.
Experts at the University of Innsbruck assessed the tournament field and concluded that several European heavyweights sit at the top of the projections — with England, France, Spain and Germany all rated among the strongest contenders.
Spain leads the model as the standout favourite.
The study suggests Spain has a 14.5 per cent chance of winning the tournament, followed by England at 12.4 per cent, then France (12.4 per cent) and Germany (11.2 per cent).
To build their forecast, the team combined multiple inputs, including historical performance, bookmaker odds, squad market values and player ratings.
Those factors were then fed into a machine-learning model designed to simulate how the tournament could unfold.
“More specifically, the algorithm estimates the predicted number of goals for all possible matches between all 48 teams in the tournament,” the researchers explained.
Based on the results, the teams listed as most likely to win the trophy are:
Spain
England
France
Germany
Portugal
Argentina
Netherlands
Brazil
Belgium
Norway
Even so, the margins between leading contenders are not huge.
“The probability that the top favorite will actually win the tournament is usually no more than 20 per cent, which conversely also means that some other team wins with a probability of 80 per cent,” said co-author Andreas Groll of TU Dortmund University, adding: “As a statistician, I’m therefore more interested in whether, on average, many of the teams we predict to go far will actually do so.”