Some people are so certain that England will win that they have painted their entire houses in the national colours ! (Houses like this are normally supposed to be black and white!) However, amongst all the speculation (an amazing number of ‘armchair experts’ appear during these competitions),  if you’re looking for a safer way to predict the outcome then how about this? In a recent edition of the magazine Wired there was a review on a new book just published called “Why England Lose”. England’s performance at major football competitions is pretty terrible – since 1966 nothing won at all – and so there are plenty of analysts out there who know (or claim to know) the answers. The authors of the book – Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski have analysed all sorts of economic data to help them predict a country’s chances of being successful in major football competitions. They claim to have identified the key factors which can influence success – these being population, GDP, and experience. The assumption is that if you have a bigger population you have more players to choose from, GDP is an indication of the wealth of your country and therefore what the training facilities and general levels of support might be like, and experience at playing football which is clearly an important factor. This would explain why India (massive population but no experience doesn’t do well. why China with a massive population and increasing amounts of experience is getting better, but why Serbia with a small population but wealth and experience does better. Their formula gives the edge one team has over the other in a game and they claim can be used to successfully predict the outcome. The formula? The goal difference (GD) = 0.137log(pop(i)/pop(j))+0.145log(y(i)/y(j))+0.739log (exp(i)/exp(j))(+0.657 home advantage when South Africa play). Well, whatever that all means the only really important thing for us is whether England are going to win – and unsurprisingly the answer is no. The formula predicts the 4 semi finalists to be Serbia, Spain, Germany and Brazil, with Serbia and Brazil going onto the final and Brazil being the winners. Got to be worth a bet!

And of course the social programme at UIC will include several live viewings of the matches – especially where they feature teams which our student body represent. Our top 10 nationalities at the moment (those who are actually in the world cup finals) are (in no particular order): Germany, S.Korea, France, Mexico, Switzerland, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Japan, England. So for students in the school choose one of these to support and join in with us.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 10:47 am and is filed under Learning English, Life in London. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.