Looking for a World Cup favorite? All you really need to know is this: The World Cup gets underway Thursday in Sao Paulo, and it’s really hard to beat Brazil in Brazil. Today we’re launching an interactive that calculates every team’s chances of advancing past the group stage and eventually winning the tournament. The forecasts […]
FiveThirtyEight’s World Cup forecasting model uses ESPN’s Soccer Power Index (SPI) — a system that combines game- and player-based ratings to estimate a team’s overall skill level — to calculate odds of each country’s performance during the two stages of the World Cup. The probabilities are based on 10,000 simulations and will be updated at […]
Over the weekend, two stories broke involving alleged corruption and FIFA, the Swiss-based international organization that oversees soccer worldwide (including the World Cup). These particular allegations are new, but they’re not surprising. Research I conducted recently suggests that FIFA faces considerable obstacles to dealing with corruption, both on the field and within its ranks. First, The New […]
Over the weekend, two stories broke involving alleged corruption and FIFA, the Swiss-based international organization that oversees soccer worldwide (including the World Cup). These particular allegations are new, but they’re not surprising. Research I conducted recently suggests that FIFA faces considerable obstacles to dealing with corruption, both on the field and within its ranks. First, The New […]
On Monday, I wrote about a recent Ipsos/Reuters survey of Americans’ interest in the World Cup. The poll showed only 6 percent of respondents plan to follow the tournament closely. But the survey was conducted exclusively in English, and, as my article discussed, that can produce questionable results. My research also led me to a separate but […]
